misspelled thoughts

i have lain with the devil and sprouted stolen wings and all i got was this lousy writing blog

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i’m better off without you, but my heart doesn’t know the difference when i stretch the vowel in stop, or part my hair to the left or curve the letters i write like you did i’m better off without you, but once in a while i’ll feel the sting of your absence in your favorite song, and the love that remains will long for the friend you once were

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god loves you, she tells me.

tell him to prove it, i say.

ask him why he made me crooked and wrong

and unlovable to everyone else

ask him why in a world full of love with nowhere to go,

he would only allow me his

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ocd

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i often poke and prod at every flaw i perceive in myself until i’m sore — but it can’t really hurt if i think it first, right?

(it still will, and i’ll preemptively blame the world for the grief it may bring me.

because i’ve spent so long expecting other people’s cruelty, that i never learned to defend against my own.)

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and i didn’t mean to put so much pressure on you when i asked if you loved me; it’s only i so desperately wanted you to look my worst in the face and say yes, so that the cruelty in my head would quiet with evidence that someone can love me, despite.

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when my dad tells me stories about my grandfather, his eyes will fill with a harrowing mixture of tangible grief and immeasurable fondness: like it hurts him to remember, but it would hurt him even more to forget.

this is how i have come to understand grief: like it’s the scab of an ugly wound you pick and pick and pick at, because you know that beneath it, once, existed something beautiful, instead. 

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i clung to the raw earth you left behind when you disappeared from one day to the other. you fertilized a perfect foot by foot square when i dug your remains deep into the soil so it would absorb the rich nutrients of only the happiest memories and so that i knew that in having lost something, i, at least, gave something back.

and then i forgot to watch it grow.

so the next time i looked, deep where i’d buried your remains, were flowers and fungi and life that smelt of you. so in this perfect foot by foot square, the one i’d forgotten to watch as it grew, lay the lies i’d told myself about you. a sight so beautiful and so surreal i almost forgot the ugliness that came before it.

somewhere in between your last words and my dirtied hands lies a traitorous hope that looks like fresh earth and whispers that nothing so truly ugly could bout something so exceptional.

but i can’t forget that when you left me behind, the soil was rough, and my hands were bloodied, and my tears tasted of salt.

and the only reason anything grew back so beautiful at all was because i’d let you decompose.