Eyes Like Drowning Suns @poisionivvyy - Tumblr Blog

You whisper, I am beautiful but what kind of beautiful

The kind that makes your gaze linger or the kind that dazzles and hurts the eyes, perhaps the kind that conjures memories of your most cherished dreams?

You call me the sweetest girl,

but what kind of sweet? Sweet like a hidden gem or sweet like a hidden blade?

You love my honeyed eyes, especially when they catch the sun’s glow. You love my tiny hands, You delight in my hair, mesmerized by its dance with the wind. When my lips part in a smile, you find joy in every curve, you love it when I talk, whether I make sense or not you love all the weird faces I make when I am mad at you you love it when I laugh at the corny jokes you make you love to read all the stuff I write (he loves to see me happy) The truth is you love every inch of me, from head to toe. you love the parts of me that nobody did Before I loved you, you taught me to love myself. you took me home from the shore draped me in the warmth of a thousand sunrises, wove serenity into my hair with gentle hands, held me close, like a fragile treasure cradled in love, wiped my tears and kissed me on the head In your embrace, I found my home.

I sit on my bed and the afternoon light unthreads itself across my skin. It moves through me the way your presence does, not loudly, not all at once, but like honey sinking into warm tea, changing everything it touches. My body, which has spent so long feeling like an abandoned house in winter, suddenly remembers how to glow. As if somewhere between your hands and your voice, you struck a match inside me and taught the dark corners how to burn gently.

You once told me I smelled of lavender. You once told me my skin was soft. Strange, the things that survive inside a person. Not grand declarations, not fireworks, but these small sentences. They return to me whenever I begin drowning in the distance between us. I carry them like smooth stones in my pocket, turning them over with my thumb whenever I miss you.

From my balcony, I still look toward that same place. The same patch of earth where you knelt beside me and tied together what I could not fix alone. The world has moved forward in a hundred tiny ways since then, but that moment remains untouched, preserved beneath glass. Do you know why I keep returning to it? Because when you are gone, I live inside memories the way others live inside cities. I walk their streets. I open their doors. I revisit every room where you brought colour back into me.

The beads around my wrist press softly against my skin, little stars trapped in orbit. I count them the way sailors count constellations. It feels ridiculous, perhaps, how much of my life bends toward you, but love has never listened to reason. It grows where it wants. It roots itself in impossible places and calls them home.

There is something about you I have never been able to translate into language. Every time I reach for the right words, they scatter like frightened birds. Beauty is too small a word. Kindness is too small a word. Everything I know how to say feels unfinished when it comes to you.

You matter to me in all the quiet ways that people rarely speak about. In the tiny disagreements that dissolve into laughter. In the familiar rhythm of your voice. In the comfort of knowing that even when we misunderstand each other, we keep finding our way back. I have watched you grow. I have watched old versions of you fall away like autumn leaves. And somehow every version has given me another reason to stay.

You became the person who listened when my anger arrived before my tears. The person who heard what I meant beneath what I said. The person who understood that some wounds speak in strange languages.

And there is nothing I could tell you that I have not already told myself a thousand times: I have never felt safer than I do around you. Safety is such an ordinary word for such an extraordinary thing. Yet there it is. The way my shoulders loosen. The way my thoughts stop pacing. The way my heart finally sits down.

You have shown me a kind of affection that asks for nothing except honesty. A tenderness so steady it reminds me of rivers never rushing, never demanding, simply remaining. You sit with my storms instead of running from them. You stay. Sometimes I think that is the greatest love there is.

You became my home long before I realised it. My favourite conversation. My safest silence. My closest friend.

People often compare love to fire, but ours feels different. It feels archaeological. As if you arrived with careful hands and infinite patience and brushed the dust from every buried part of me. Layer by layer. Bone by bone. Until even the pieces I had forgotten were still there became visible again.

You saw the scars. You saw the places where life cracked me open. And instead of turning away, you stitched gentleness through every fracture. You taught me that healing is not a sudden miracle but a slow gathering of light.

Sometimes I am terrified by how deeply I care for you. Terrified because there is no distance left between my love and my fear of losing it. If my heart were a compass, every direction would still point back to you.

I want to be the place where you feel safest. The place where you can lay down every burden and every version of yourself. Because that is what you have been for me.

And when you tell me you love me, it feels almost unfair. As though the universe misplaced a blessing and somehow dropped it into my hands. It makes me feel impossibly lucky to exist in the same lifetime as you.

When you smile, something ancient inside me surrenders. The whole world softens at its edges. Blood rushes warm through me, bright as crushed pomegranates, and I cannot help but smile back.

You carry a warmth that a hundred suns could never imitate. Not because it burns brighter, but because it burns kinder. Your smile arrives suddenly, like a firefly appearing in the dark, and somehow the night becomes less frightening.

Even your smallest habits feel precious to me. The way you look around a room. The way you laugh before finishing a sentence. The way your eyes crinkle when you're trying not to smile. All these little things gather together until they become a constellation I know by heart.

When you hold me close, I hear your heartbeat and something within me instinctively answers it. Two clocks finding the same hour. Two tides learning the same moon.

I think about your hand on my chest more often than I admit. The weight of your palm resting above my heart as though you were listening for something. As though my heartbeat was a language and you were patient enough to learn it. The room had gone quiet. My pulse stumbled beneath your hand, reckless and traitorous, giving away every feeling I had tried so carefully to hide. I remember wondering whether you could feel it. Whether you could feel how violently my body loved you.

Even the smallest things become sacred after being seen by you. There is a tiny mark on my left thigh that I stopped noticing years ago. An ordinary thing. Forgettable. Yet somehow after you looked at it, it felt different. Love is strange like that. It takes ordinary things and places them beneath another sky. Suddenly they become important simply because they belong to someone you love.

My favourite memory has always been the same one though. It is the moment before you kiss me.

The way your hand finds my chin. The way your fingers tilt my face upward. Slowly. Never rushed. Never careless. As though you are savouring those final seconds before closing the distance between us.

There is always a moment where the world seems to hold its breath. A small trembling pause suspended between us. Then I look at you and everything else begins to disappear. The noise in my head quiets. My worries loosen their grip. My thoughts scatter like moths startled from a porch light.

And then your lower lip finds mine. That is always the moment I lose myself. Not dramatically. Not all at once.Slowly.

Like ink bleeding through water.

Like dusk swallowing the edges of a summer evening.

Like a wave pulling gently at the shore until the sand no longer remembers where it began.

Every coherent thought leaves me. Every worry dissolves. Every fear falls silent. There is only you. Only the warmth of you. Only the impossible feeling of being loved by the person I love most.

I think that is what you have done to me, really.

You have made a home inside places I thought would always remain empty.

Before you, I felt like a house with all its curtains drawn. A place even I had stopped visiting. Then you arrived and opened the windows one by one. You let the light in. You sat beside the ghosts. You learned every creaking floorboard and stayed anyway.

You saw all the unfinished parts of me. The frightened parts. The angry parts. The fragile parts. The parts I inherited from years of growing up and learning how to survive. You saw them all and never once treated them like something that needed hiding.

And maybe that is why I love you.

Not because you make my heart race.

Though you do.

Not because your kiss makes me forget my own name for a second.

Though it does.

But because you make being loved feel safe.

You make tenderness feel ordinary.

You make staying seem easy.

And when I think about you now, sitting here with the afternoon light stretched across my skin, I realise that loving you has never felt like being struck by lightning.

It has felt like roots.

Slowly growing beneath the earth.

Quietly. Patiently.

Until one day they are so deep that you cannot imagine where they end and where you begin.

And perhaps that is the truest thing I know.

That somewhere between your hand beneath my chin, your palm over my heartbeat, your care that resembles home, and all the countless little ways you choose me every day, you have become woven into the fabric of my life so completely that even my loneliness carries your shape. And if I spent the rest of my life trying to explain what you mean to me, I think I would still fall short. Some feelings are simply too large for language. You are one of them.

And even now, with all these words spread before me, it still feels as though I have barely begun to tell you how much I love you.

I want to spend the rest of my life dancing to slow music with you in elevators. In kitchens at midnight. In living rooms with the lights off. In all the ordinary places people forget to romanticise. I want years of reaching for your hand without thinking. Years of hearing your laugh from another room and feeling my entire day soften around the sound of it. And if I am lucky, here's to a lifetime of getting lost in your eyes, slow dancing with you wherever we happen to be, and loving you with the same quiet certainty with which the moon returns to the sea. Happy birthday, my love.

There are parts of me

I keep trying to outgrow

but they follow me everywhere

like the smell of rain trapped in old clothes.

I carry so much grief in my body

it has started settling into my bones.

Some nights it sits in my throat so heavily

I cannot tell

if I am swallowing memories

or swallowing pieces of myself.

And God, it hurts.

It hurts in quiet ways.

In the way I laugh too quickly

so nobody notices the shaking underneath.

In the way I stare at ceilings for hours

feeling my chest cave inward

like a house rotting from the inside.

Some wounds do not heal.

They just learn how to breathe quietly

under the skin.

I think there is something terribly wrong with me

something cracked and unfinished.

Because no matter how gently

I hold my own heart,

it still bleeds through my fingers.

no matter how much love

or time

or sleep I pour into myself,

the hollow only stretches wider,

like a room abandoned too long.

Every wound I thought I survived

returns with a different face.

And I let it in every single time.

I let it sit beside me at 2 a.m.

I let it speak in my voice.

I let it convince me

that healing was only something

that happened to other people.

There is a version of me

somewhere deep inside

curled up like a dying animal,

flinching every time I try to reach her.

And I do try.

God, I try so hard.

I stitch myself back together

with trembling hands

only to come apart again

at the slightest touch.

I close doors

then spend the entire night

with my forehead against them,

aching for someone to knock back.

knuckles bruised with wanting,

heart sore from all the leaving

and returning.

I run in circles so often

I think grief has memorized my footsteps.

I keep searching for peace

as if it is a place I misplaced,

as if I did not lose it

slowly, painfully,

inside people

inside failures

inside the unbearable weight

of being myself.

And maybe that is the cruelest thing

that I cannot escape me.

I drag my sadness everywhere.

It sleeps beside me.

It drinks from my mouth.

It wears my face so well

sometimes I do not know

where it ends

and I begin.

Still, every morning,

I wake up and try again.

Not because I believe things will get better,

but because some small, exhausted part of me

still refuses to die.

they say sunflowers are loyal to light

that they spend their days

neck bent, spine arching,

worshipping something that burns them

but no one talks about the night

how in the absence of the sun,

they turn

not to the sky,

but to each other

and i

i found you there

not in the gold of morning,

not when i was easy to love,

but in a dark that had already swallowed

all my tomorrows

you

my sunflower

in a sky that forgot how to hold light

happy two months, baby

(my first real us.)

and still, i don’t understand

how something this consuming

fits itself into something as small as time

two months

and yet i swear

i have lived entire lifetimes

inside the space between your hands and mine

i have known people before

in halves, in pauses, in almosts

but i have never known certainty

the way i know you

with you,

i do not edit my edges

i do not soften the storm

i do not become smaller

just to be held

and still

you stay

even when loving me must feel like

cupping water in your hands

only to realise

i am the ocean

it’s only been two months,

and yet it feels like i’ve known your soul

longer than time has known itself

like we’ve existed in fragments of each other

for years centuries, even

finding our way back

again and again

and at the same time,

these two months slipped through my fingers like sunlight

too fast, too warm, too beautiful

to hold onto long enough

do you even understand

what you do to me

the way your hands move over me

like you’re not touching skin,

but learning a language

you plan to speak fluently

the way you pull me closer

like distance itself offends you

when you kiss me,

it is not gentle

it is not careful

it feels like something is being taken from me

my breath, my thoughts,

my sense of where i end and you begin

and i let you

god, i let you

because in those moments

i am not a person anymore

i am something collapsing,

something burning,

something completely, irreversibly yours

like a meteor

that doesn’t fear the fall

because it knows

it is falling into an ocean

that will not destroy it,

only devour it whole

and i have never

never felt this safe in someone’s hands before

not the soft, quiet kind of safety

but the kind that terrifies you,

because it makes you realise

you would bleed for it

and still call it love

the kind that makes leaving impossible

because there is nowhere left to go

once you have been held like this

i know i’ve said so much of this before

in late-night calls,

in whispers,

in the way i hold onto you

a little tighter each time

but it’s true in a deeper way now

because my love for you hasn’t stayed the same

it has grown

quietly, intensely, inevitably

i find you everywhere now

in the pause between songs,

in the way my name sounds softer in my own head,

in the strange calm

that follows chaos

like my world

without asking me

has started revolving around you

i want this to last

god, i want this to last

i want the late nights,

the soft mornings,

and the version of us that doesn’t exist yet

i want beaches and moonlit skies

and your fingers brushing my hair away from my face

just so you can look at me properly

before you kiss me like you always do

your voice close enough to break me,

your touch lingering

like it doesn’t ever plan to leave

i want nights that blur into mornings

where time dissolves

and it’s just you and me

and everything we are too afraid to say out loud

i want the version of us

that no one else gets to see

i want a future that feels like you

i want years from now

wrinkles, tired eyes, slow mornings

and you beside me in a rocking chair

our hands still finding each other

out of habit

out of love that never learned how to leave

i want to still feel seventeen with you

still feel like that girl who first fell

completely, helplessly, beautifully

too fast, too hard, too recklessly

and never once regretted it

and maybe one day

love will grow legs and run ahead of us

into small eyes that crinkle like yours,

into laughter that sounds like home,

into pieces of you

the world gets to keep

but right now

you are here

and i am here

you are mine

and i am yours

and these two months

have been enough

to ruin me for anything less

i loved before,

maybe

but this

this feels like something that chose me

the way the tide chooses the shore

again,

and again,

and again

this is the kind of love

that consumes,

that stains,

that stays in your bones

long after everything else has left

i love you

not softly

not safely

but like something

that intends to stay

like something that would rather burn

than ever let you go

forever

and then some more

A comet once skinned the sky I was that burn. Too fast for anyone to name, too bright for anyone to stare at for long. They whispered “wow” and went back to bed. No one made a wish.

I am moonlit soft, silver, haunting. But no one writes sonnets for the moon. They wait for the sun, warm, loud, golden someone else.

A moth in a hallway of flames, I flinch toward light but burn on doorknobs instead. I smell like smoke, not perfume.

I frost over everything I love. Intricate. Uninvited. Gone by morning.

26/03/26

What I love about you is not gentle, it is the way you trespass into the places I kept unnamed, the small locked rooms I never thought to open.

Your fingers do not just fit mine, they claim them, like they have memorized the spaces before I was even aware of them.

You finish me in ways that frighten me a little, my sentences, yes, but also the silences I hide inside, the hollowness I learned to carry like a second spine.

It is a quiet invasion, the way you know, the way you arrive at meanings I never speak aloud.

They call this a phase, as if love is something that exhausts itself, as if we will one day wake up emptied of this.

But this does not feel like something that will leave, it feels like something that has already rooted, something that has made a home in marrow, not memory.

I have mistaken fire before, held brightness that turned to ash in my hands. This is not that kind of ruin.

You are not a flame that flickers, you are the kind that consumes quietly, completely, until there is no clear edge between what is you and what is me.

And if this is temporary, then it is a temporary that has already learned how to stay.

remanence-of-love

sunsetandfun

This.....

They talk about the right person like it’s a miracle you recognize instantly, how everything aligns, how the world sharpens into meaning. How even the things you once swore against turn into prayers you whisper at night. For me, that thing was touch.

I used to flee from it the way closed eyes flinch from sudden light. Not out of fear never fear but reverence. Touch felt like confession, like handing someone the keys to my ribcage and trusting them not to break anything sacred. It was soul-work. I rationed it carefully. Hugs were rare, kisses rarer, small offerings given only to those who felt like home.

And then there was you.

When you hold me, something in my body exhales, like it’s been waiting centuries for that exact shape of arms, that exact closeness. When your fingers thread through mine, my hand forgets how to be tense it yields, it softens, it remembers. And when your lips meet mine, I don’t pull away or protest or think. I open. I want. I crave. Again and again.

My blood wakes up. It rushes, loud and electric, through every inch of me. And while you kiss me, your hands move slow, deliberate gliding over my body like you’re learning a language written only in skin. Everywhere you touch, a quiet fire blooms. A patient heat. A promise.

When your hand slips beneath my shirt and your skin meets mine, my body doesn’t brace itself the way it used to. It doesn’t armor up. It relaxes. It melts. My skin recognizes you before my mind does, dissolving under your touch like it’s always known you would come. You trace me carefully, reverently, like mapping constellations every line, every curve held in memory. And I swear, not once did I stop you. Not once did I want to.

I couldn’t keep my hands off you either. Couldn’t keep my lips from finding yours, again and again, as if the space between us was unbearable, as if distance itself had become a threat. I remember how we both gave in, how we stopped pretending there was restraint left. How I kept kissing you, breathless and sure. How your hands roamed like you were claiming something already yours, like you were leaving yourself behind in me.

And you did.

That mark on my neck, tender, undeniable. When my fingers trace over it now, my body remembers before my thoughts do. I feel you there, still. Like an echo. Like a bruise that isn’t pain, but proof.

I hope you are reading this at six in the evening, on the ninth of February, when time folds back on itself and remembers that exactly a month ago, at this same hour, my fingers typed a small, careless word—hey—and unknowingly opened the floodgates. Love does not announce itself with ceremony. It arrives quietly, disguised as coincidence, disguised as timing, disguised as a moment that feels ordinary until it ruins you forever. (And yes, I know I probably sent this to you on the eighth, because when it comes to you, I have never learned how to wait. Anticipation collapses in your presence. Time bends. I rush toward you the way a confession rushes toward the mouth.)

Before you, my heart was not broken, it was sealed. Locked so tightly that even air had stopped trying to enter. I had learned how to survive without softness, how to exist without being touched by hope. And then you looked at me. Not past me. Not around me. At me. Somehow, impossibly, you made room where there was none. Now my heart beats differently. It has learned your rhythm. It responds to your nearness by accelerating, by sending warmth through my veins until my body blooms into a shade of red that only appears when I am seen by you, when I am known.

Look at us. Look at the way I dissolve into you without resistance, the way I soften like wax remembering the shape of flame. My eyes, once scorched and tired, learn gentleness again when they find yours. There is a sweetness that settles into me when I see you, a quiet surrender. My mouth, worn thin by smoke and silence and things unsaid, curves into something new, something unguarded, something alive just because you exist in front of me. And still, you ask why I fell for you.

Listen carefully, my love.

I remember the beginning with surgical clarity, the way you spoke, the way you tested closeness without trespassing, the way your affection never felt like pressure. You flirted like someone who respected the fragility of another person’s interior world. You held your desire with restraint, and somehow that gentleness undid me more than anything reckless ever could. You took a mess like me—loud, emotional, uneven and held it without complaint. You saw straight through me and didn’t try to fix what you found there. You stayed.

No matter how loud I got, no matter how sharply my words spilled, no matter how chaotic my emotions became, you never made me feel disposable. You never made me feel like love was something I had to earn by shrinking myself. You wrapped me in a calm I had never been given before. You draped me in serenity. You taught me, slowly and without speeches, that I am worthy of being loved fully, without punishment, without conditions.

We are opposites written into the same sentence. You are still water, tall and unshaken, anger barely touching your face. I am all sparks and sudden storms, always on the edge of combustion. And yet, when you pull me into your arms, something ancient in me recognizes safety. It feels like arriving home after years of running without knowing where I was headed. It feels like rest. Like permission to stop bracing for impact.

You love every part of me—not just the beautiful ones. You love my eyes, my messy auburn hair, the way your hands instinctively find them as if they already know where they belong. You love the parts of me I was still learning to forgive. And you still ask why I fell for you—when your eyes feel like something I will search for in every lifetime, when your smile ignites my chest like a struck match, when your presence alone rearranges my breathing. I want to memorize you. I want my hands to remember you even when time tries to erase us.

The first time you held me, my body understood something before my mind caught up. Every bone softened. Every guarded place loosened its grip. My veins relaxed, my skin felt like it finally belonged to me again. I remember thinking—not dramatically, not loudly, but with terrifying certainty—this is it. This is the feeling people spend their lives searching for and pretending they don’t need.

Now, every time you come close, every time your presence finds me again, my heart responds like it has known you far longer than it should. With you, comfort is instinctive. Natural. My body does not hesitate. It leans toward you as if it has been waiting, as if some part of me recognized you long before my name ever touched your lips.

And when you kiss me, when your mouth finds mine, it feels like the world briefly forgets how to stand still. Something bright blooms inside me every time—quiet at first, then overwhelming—like a sky learning how to hold light. Your kiss carries a gentleness that disarms me completely, and my body, traitorous and honest, leans into you without hesitation, asking for nothing except more of this closeness. I have never known a touch that felt so familiar, so safe, as if my skin recognizes you before my mind does. When your hands rest on me, steady and sure, I feel gathered, claimed, held in a way that makes me want to stay forever in that moment. And the way you look at me then—soft, hopeful, asking without words for just one more second—undoes me entirely. I swear I would give all of myself, every lifetime of me, just to live inside that feeling again.

Everything leads back to you. Every song feels like it was written with you hidden between the lines. I wake up with you already threaded through my thoughts. I fall asleep with your absence humming softly beside me. I see you everywhere, and for once, I do not complain about longing. I let it live in me. I let it grow.

You are every birthday candle I ever blew out too quickly, every coin I tossed into water, every wish I whispered and didn’t believe would come true. And now that I have you, I ask the universe for nothing else. Loving you feels like abundance. Like arrival. Like the end of wanting more.

I love you in ways language keeps failing to contain. But if forever has a texture, I hope it feels like this, quiet, consuming, intimate, ours. And someday, when time has softened us both, I hope our children carry my eyes and your smile, and that love continues to move through the world wearing our faces.

I love you— to the moon, and back, and all the space in between.

(And when the world narrows down to just us, when distance dissolves and I am close enough to feel your presence without touching it, something in me opens completely, unguarded and honest, as if my body and heart both recognize you as familiar territory. Being near you makes me ache in the softest way, the kind of ache that is full of trust, full of wanting without fear. I feel myself lean toward you instinctively, like my soul knows the direction before my mind does, like closeness with you is something I have been rehearsing for all my life. There is a quiet intensity in the way you look at me, in the way you linger, in the way your nearness settles me and unsettles me all at once, and I give myself to that feeling without resistance. I have never known a comfort that felt this consuming, a warmth that felt this safe while still making my heart race. With you, I want slowly, deeply, completely; I want in a way that is patient but relentless, tender but undeniable. Loving you feels like standing at the edge of myself and choosing, again and again, to step closer rather than pull away, to trust the pull between us, to let myself be seen in all my wanting. And if passion is not just heat but devotion, not just desire but surrender, then this—this quiet, burning closeness with you—is the most honest version of love I have ever known. And if love is something we learn slowly, through patience and care and choosing each other again and again, then I want to keep learning it with you, in all its quiet intensity, for as long as time allows—because being loved by you feels like being held by the world itself, and loving you feels like finally understanding why my heart was made the way it is.)

september303-deactivated2026032

Hug me… not briefly, not gently, but like the world is falling apart and I’m the only soft thing left to hold.

Hold me until my heartbeat forgets its rhythm and learns yours instead. Until my breath is borrowed from the air between your collarbones.

Wrap me in silence, in the scent of your skin warm like sun-drenched cotton, faint like forgotten rain.

Let my body wear your presence like a second skin. Let your essence bury itself in the fabric of my clothes, in the seams of my soul, in the hollow of my throat where your name sits like prayer.

Press me close until I lose the map of myself, until every cell in me smells like home, and home is you.

I want strangers to notice, to pause beside me and whisper, "Who is it that you carry in your scent?" And I’ll smile, soft and wild, because they’ll never know how deeply I’ve inhaled you, how much of me is no longer mine.

Hug me like you’re rewriting my memory, like you’re turning me into something new, a perfume of shared longing, a whisper of your touch that lingers in the folds of everything I wear.

Stay close, until even time forgets where I end and you begin. INSTAGRAM

It’s been five days. Five sunsets swallowed and returned, and we haven’t exchanged a word not even the small mercy of a glance.

Four months of speaking every day, about nothing in particular, yet those nothings fit so perfectly into the empty spaces between my fingers, right where I imagined yours.

And you— you with your glacier-heart and porcelain face— do you feel anything at all? or do feelings slide off you like rain off a marble tomb?

But I know how I do, and it sits heavy in my chest like wet ash. I am furious— not at the way you never loved right, nor at the silk-thin promises you let fray in your mouth,

but at the nothingness. How small I must have been, a shadow passing across your wall, a trick of the light you never bothered to confirm.

How easy, how terribly easy, to erase me. To walk forward without turning back, like I was merely scenery a town you passed through and forgot to name.

You were never unaware; you just chose to look away. And I can’t tell anymore if you were actually there with me, or if I’d built an entire person out of borrowed pieces of you.

How cold you are— your absence frostbites the memory of your touch.

You were my mistake, my beautiful gunshot. How I ached to be yours, to leave teeth-marks on your story to carve my initials into your ruin.

But when our eyes meet yours dull as the blade of an old razor, mine black from swallowing stars I won’t worship the wreck. You’ll no longer be my favorite crime scene just a theory of fate I should never have tested

You are good at promising at offering doors you never intended to open, keys that only unlock disappointment. at handing out futures like candies laced with bleach. And it fills my veins with tar, with the kind of hatred that tastes like perfume and funeral wine.

weltenwellen

An Interview with Richard Siken

alwaysbeenjessica

learning that curiosity is at the root of all that i do, and making space for it instead of running away

Yesterday felt like a bruise you don’t notice until you touch it. The farewell was loud, careless, full of people pretending endings are celebratory. I saw you there—standing in your body so easily, like it belonged to you, like you hadn’t borrowed it from all the girls who learned how to love by watching you exist. (Standing there so comfortably inside your life, inside your skin, like it had never once been heavy to carry. Like it hadn’t crushed anyone else under its weight.)

When we finally spoke, it felt borrowed. Our words did not belong to us; they were loaned, returned quickly, kept clean. Awkward in the way intimacy pretends to be casual. Cute, maybe—if you believe tenderness should always come with an expiry date. We took two pictures. Only two. Proof, rationed carefully, like the universe was afraid I’d ask for more. I smiled in them. I shouldn’t have. I didn’t know yet that they would later feel like evidence at a trial where I was both witness and accused.

Then your friends said it.

They smiled. They laughed. They said it lightly, almost lovingly, as if it was a compliment you could just accept and move on from. “You look cute together.”

Cute.

The word landed wrong. Too soft. Too small. Too careless for what it did to me. It echoed inside my head like something breaking, like glass dropped into water that doesn’t splash but still shatters. Cute—as if we were something harmless. Temporary. Decorative. Something you notice and then forget. Cute—as if what I felt had not been violent, consuming, bone-deep. Cute—as if this wasn’t the closest I’d ever come to being chosen.

I wanted to scream that cute is what you call beginnings, not endings. Cute is what you call things you don’t intend to keep.

And right then—right when their laughter was still hanging in the air—it hit me. You won’t be here next year. You will leave. You will walk out of the geography of my life so cleanly it will look intentional. No accidental eye contact. No shared spaces pretending to be fate. No hope disguised as coincidence. Just absence. Just me standing where you once stood, trying to remember how to exist without measuring distance.

I watched you with your people—your real people—the ones who get to lean into you without permission, the ones who know how you laugh when you’re not holding anything back. And something in me collapsed so quietly I almost missed it. I wished, with a shame that tasted metallic, that I belonged to you the way they did. That I held a proximity you didn’t have to explain or ration or justify.

I keep asking the same question like it might get tired of denying me. What more can I do? What version of myself would finally be enough?

And the answer keeps returning unchanged, unmoved by my desperation. Nothing. There is nothing left.

I am exhausted from knocking on the same door with different hands. From hearing the same refusal dressed up as kindness. I press my thumb into my palm while I write this, hard enough to hurt, because pain feels honest when it comes from my own body. I really believed I was finished. I told myself I had survived worse. That I was ready for whatever came next—even if it was emptiness, even if it was grief in a new font.

But when I turn the page, it’s blank. Not peaceful. Not hopeful. Just blank in the way rooms feel after someone has moved out and taken all the furniture but left the dust.

And instead of writing forward, I read myself backward. I reread every moment where you almost loved me. Where the air between us felt charged, like it only needed one wrong movement to explode. I pretend the blank page is not asking me to choose. I pretend I don’t know how cowardly nostalgia can be.

Because writing something new would mean abandoning you somewhere unreachable. Leaving you behind without a map, without a return address. And the truth is humiliating—I am terrified of losing the scraps of you I still possess. The jagged pieces. The half-finished sentences. The moments that never learned how to end properly. I hold onto them like they are vital organs, even though they are slowly killing me.

When I see you with people who are not me—especially the ones you choose, the ones you seek—I feel my body shut down. I become still, like prey. I wonder what proximity demands as payment, because I have already given love, patience, time, dignity. I have given everything short of self-annihilation. Still, the lighter clicks uselessly in my hand. Still, nothing ignites. Still, I am cold.

I have never been this confused. My body forgets its own language around you. It does not know how to want and retreat at the same time. And the cruelty of it all is this—I love you so much it makes me inert. You try. I see it. You show effort. But effort without desire is a starvation diet, and my heart is ravenous. It wants excess. It wants certainty. It wants to be chosen without footnotes.

I keep saying this is the last time. I keep promising myself restraint. And I keep breaking myself open again, just to prove I can still feel.

This time, I don’t want to be saved. I want the pain to finish me properly. I want the anger and grief to consume every version of me that still looks for you in crowded rooms. Because I know the truth I avoid saying aloud: I will never look at you the same way again. And I don’t trust myself to pretend. If I see you, every guard will fall. I will be summoned back into those eyes like I never learned how dangerous they were.

I cannot afford to ruin myself again just because you hold me without knowing what it costs.

And yet—I know what will happen. When I finish writing this, I will probably text you. Because hope is not a choice; it’s a reflex. Because I still believe something can be salvaged from the wreckage. Because I still think understanding you might undo this damage. Or soften it. Or at least make it survivable.

Someone said endings are meant to be good. That if they aren’t, they aren’t endings at all. So I ask myself if this—this slow, public unraveling—is just a beginning in disguise.

Maybe this year failed us. Maybe timing did. Maybe we were never meant to happen at the same speed. Maybe one morning—after another long night, gathering empty bottles and burnt-out cigarettes, proof that I lived through it—I’ll wake up to something better.

Or maybe the next time I write, it won’t be about wanting. Maybe it will be about distance. Or silence. Or finally learning how to let go.

Or maybe—if the universe decides to be cruel in a different way— it will be about us, and how even pain can learn how to stay.

There is a theory people like because it pretends love is orderly. It says we fall in love exactly three times. The first is innocent, they say—the kind that feels infinite because you don’t yet know what endings look like. It is clumsy and pure and loud, and it convinces you that love is something that arrives to stay. The second love is the violent one. The one that dismantles you. The one that turns itself into a mirror and forces you to look at every insecurity, every wound, every hunger you did not know you had. It is intense, consuming, humiliating. It breaks you open and leaves you exposed to yourself. And then, after all that damage, after healing, after self-love, comes the third love—the unexpected one. The safe one. The one without games. The one that feels like home. The theory ends there, neat and reassuring, as if everyone survives long enough to reach the third chapter.

I have never trusted theories that don’t account for wreckage.

My first love taught me what love was supposed to feel like. He showed me how affection can steady your breathing, how being chosen can rearrange your bones, how someone’s attention can feel like sunlight after a long illness. I learned the texture of warmth, the language of care, the way a look can make you feel briefly untouchable. I believed in permanence because I had never seen it fail. And then it failed anyway. Not dramatically. Not loudly. It simply burned itself out, the way stars do—brilliant until they aren’t, collapsing under their own weight. What was left was ash. Fine, grey, inescapable ash. And I kept it. I kept it like evidence. Like a sacred object. I treated the remains of us as if devotion could reverse entropy. I carried those ashes through years that did not slow down for my grief. I compared every voice to his, every presence to the shape he once occupied. I was willing to sacrifice my future at the altar of a memory, while he had already moved on, already unlearned me, already placed his life somewhere I could not follow. I waited two years—not hopefully, not bravely—but stubbornly, like someone refusing to evacuate a burning house because they loved the walls.

Letting go did not feel like release. It felt like scattering parts of myself into the wind and pretending it was a choice.

Then there was you. And you were nothing like the theory promised. You did not arrive healed. You did not arrive safe. You did not arrive when I was ready. You arrived quietly, almost accidentally, and embedded yourself so deeply that I did not notice until removal felt impossible.I don’t know if what I feel for you qualifies as love, because love implies symmetry, and we have never been equal. To you, we are nothing—or something so small it doesn’t deserve a name. To me, you are everywhere. Eight months is a long time to pretend indifference. Long enough to know exactly how this ends. Long enough to recognize that in many ways, it already has. And still, I orbit you. Still, every road inside my head curves back to you as if memory itself has been rewired.(I return to you compulsively, like muscle memory, like a body turning toward pain because pain is familiar and familiarity feels like safety.)

I don’t know what keeps me tethered. Maybe it’s the way you give me just enough—just enough attention to stay, just enough warmth to keep me hopeful, just enough absence to keep me starving. Maybe I believe that if I had more time, more access, more of you,

we could have been inevitable. Or maybe I am simply attached to longing itself, addicted to the ache, feeding on the possibility of something that refuses to exist. Not talking to you feels like withdrawal. Like my body has forgotten how to circulate blood. Like oxygen has decided to punish me. I thought distance would save me. I thought not seeing you every day would loosen your grip. Instead, the days without you are louder. Sharper. You haunt me more efficiently in absence. Silence has learned your name.

And still—still—I cannot hate you. Not even when I try. Not even when I catalogue the ways you have undone me quietly, politely, without malice. My anger dissolves before it reaches you. My heart refuses to harden. It insists on softness, even now, even when softness costs me everything. There is something humiliating about how deeply I want you. About how I crave proximity more than clarity. I want time with you. Space near you. The unremarkable intimacy of your presence. And I don’t understand why the universe keeps sabotaging my escape—why every attempt to leave is met with coincidence after coincidence pulling me back, as if fate itself is bored and using me for entertainment.

I don’t know what this ache is called. I only know it is familiar. The last time I felt it, I was thirteen, still believing love was something that arrived and stayed. Now I am seventeen, standing at the edge of myself, willing to lose every version of who I have been if it meant building something with you. My body betrays me when you enter a room. My eyes soften without consent. My voice forgets how to protect me. I scan crowds for you instinctively, irrationally, just for proof that you exist outside my head. I know I am foolish. I know this devotion is asymmetrical, inconvenient, doomed. And yet I would still go beyond reason for you. Beyond pride. Beyond safety. I want one honest moment—one hug untainted by doubt—and I am terrified that even that would ruin me, because I would never want to be released.

So no, I don’t know if I’ve loved once or twice. I don’t know if this counts as love at all. But I know this: what I feel for you is unconditional enough to survive without a name. It does not ask for permission. It does not require reciprocation. It only waits. Quietly. Relentlessly. In the spaces you don’t look, in the pauses between your words, in the hope that one day you will turn around and realize I have been here all along—still breathing, still breaking, still choosing you. (I will wait in the spaces you don’t look,in the pauses between your words,in the hope that one day you will turn aroundand find me still here.)

Always.And forever.

(Maybe this is why the theory fails me. Because it assumes love is something that teaches. But this doesn’t teach me anything. It erases me. It leaches color from my thinking. It turns desire into something clinical, procedural, repetitive. I don’t ache loudly anymore I ache efficiently. I have learned how to function while hollow. I have learned how to want you without expecting you. I have learned how to disappear politely. If there is a third love waiting somewhere, it will not recognize me. I will be too thinned out, too cauterized, too accustomed to survival masquerading as devotion.

So when they say you fall in love three times, I imagine a body on an operating table, opened and closed and opened again, each time with less blood to spare. I imagine surgeons congratulating themselves on the cleanliness of the incision while something vital quietly drains away. Maybe I crossed a limit without ever knowing it existed. Maybe I spent all my love early and now I am living on residue. Or maybe some of us were never meant for the final, gentle love at all. Maybe some of us are meant to love like an illness—chronic, untreated, managed but never cured. A condition that does not kill you outright, but ensures you are never fully alive again.

If that’s the case, then let this be my diagnosis: I loved once, and it burned. I loved again, and it numbed. I don’t know what comes next. I only know that whatever I feel for you is not a step forward. It is a stillness. A red quiet. A poppy blooming where something should have healed. And I lie down beside it, not hoping, not praying—just waiting for the pain to either finish its work or finally teach me how to stop feeling at all.)

𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐍𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐌𝐄𝐀𝐍𝐓 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐌𝐄 𝐁𝐔𝐓 𝐈 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐎𝐊 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐀 𝐒𝐈𝐆𝐍

I never loved you— not with the ferocity I offered the boys who built funeral pyres out of my softness and asked me to lie down in them as if it were a privilege.

But you— you were a strange kind of quiet miracle, like a match struck in a room that forgot light existed.

You weren’t beautiful in that destructive, ruinous way that convinces girls like me to die a little just to be seen. No, you were a softer burn— a lantern light, tired and trembling, saying my name like it had dusted it off after years of storage.

I should’ve known better. But my heart, that gullible organ— it keeps kneeling at the altars of men who smile like promises.

When I told you your smile was kind, you didn’t look away. You held the moment like it was something alive. You looked at me as if I was the first warm thing you’d seen all winter.

And the animal in me— the one starved for affection since childhood storms tore through my bones— began scratching at the walls of my body, begging to be touched, to be chosen, to be fed something other than disappointment.

You fed it crumbs and I mistook them for a feast.

I thought you were steady hands sent to gather all my scattered pieces. I thought you were the boy who’d finally make the world apologize for the way it broke me.

Perhaps I built you from the soft-spoken way you opened doors, from the way you played your songs for me like confessions, from the way our shadows walked in sync down narrow corridors where the silence felt almost holy.

Maybe that was my sin— mistaking tenderness for intention.

You made me believe I had reached the place I’d been running toward my whole life. As if the universe whispered, "Stop. Sit. This one won’t hurt you."

And like a fool who’s never known gentle love, I listened. Isn’t that how every tragedy begins? I wouldn’t say I loved you— God, spare me that blasphemy— but I would have. I would have handed you the soft underbelly of my becoming, the petals I kept folded for years, ready to bloom at the sound of your certainty.

I began to unfold— petal by petal, like a flower too naive to fear winter.

But right when the bloom touched air, you said, “I don’t see this going anywhere.” As if my heart were an incorrect address. As if you hadn’t left love-shaped fingerprints all over my ribs.

Tell me— where were these words when you called our height difference cute? When you said you wanted to know me so you’d never hurt me? When your eyes softened as if they’d found something rare in my unsure smile?

Where were these words when you walked beside me, matching your steps to mine? When you shared your songs your crooked smiles, your goofy little boy photographs as if they belonged in my palms? When you looked at me with the kind of warmth that could melt a decade of frost? When your eyes read me like a sunrise they were learning to trust?

Where were these words when you made me believe in something gentler than survival?

I was ready to hand you my hidden, trembling parts— the ones that still remember how abandonment tastes. I was ready to let you in to the long hallway of my fears, to show you the ghosts that chew on my old wounds.

You knew this. You knew how time had butchered my faith. You knew how terrified I was of being left unfinished— half-loved, half-held, half-abandoned. You knew my history, how the past had chewed me hollow, how I feared abandonment like a second death.

And still, you let me fall like something disposable from your tired hands.

I gathered my pieces again— familiar ritual, my palms stained with déjà vu. Funny how pain remembers its choreography.

The hallways we walked now feel like ribs of a dead animal. The songs you shared taste like metal. Every place we touched time together has become a shrine I am too scared to kneel in.

Do you know what the cruelest part is?

I am shattered— not because you didn’t stay, but because you lit a candle in my darkness just to show me how beautiful it could have been before you snuffed it out with that indifferent wind you call honesty.

You made me believe love was finally reaching for me— that I could stop running, that I could rest.

But you turned out to be another mirage in a desert that keeps swallowing me whole.

I didn’t fall for you because I liked you. No— I fell because for one suspended heartbeat I thought you loved me.

And that, you proved, was my cruelest mistake.

He told my friend, almost laughing, “what even happened with just one smile— it was just a soft smile.” But how do I explain that some smiles don’t land on the skin, they lodge themselves like warm embers beneath the ribs? He doesn’t know that a writer was watching— someone cursed with the habit of turning fleeting things into forever. His smile, small and harmless to him, slipped into me like a quiet haunting. It settled in some unlit corridor of my chest, refusing to leave, glowing faintly like the last coal of a burnt-out house.

And maybe he’ll never understand how that first goddamn smile rewired something— how it made me want to see him again, if only to witness that gentle curve of his mouth that speaks louder than any confession. That’s what a smile does. It translates the unsayable; it spills truths the tongue is too afraid to hold.~~~

I have this ruinous virtue— the way I bleed myself into a person I love. There is no brake, no boundary, no red-flagged stop. I pour and pour until the last drop is a ghost, until I am an empty chalice humming with loss. And when even my nothingness is scraped clean, I would flay my own skin— offer it, warm and honest, into your hands.

You don’t know this kind of devotion. Even if you drove a knife into my marrow I would cradle the wound, say it was the wind, say it was fate, say it was me that slipped.

Yes, I feel too much— but God, how violently I feel when my eyes collide with yours. Your hair flickers gold like a dying sun, your voice is a soft-room where I go to collapse.

My friends call me foolish. They say we are a mismatched equation, that you don’t want me—not the way I burn for you. Perhaps they’re right: even if you wanted me, you could never want me with this lunatic hunger, this tidal devotion.

I am the moon, feral in my longing. You are the sun— untouchable, self-lit, shining even when I am nothing but a dark rind waiting to glow from borrowed light.

Maybe we are right people, wrong time. But I will never be sixteen again— never again will these honey-brown eyes hold such innocent disaster for anyone else. Men vanish; you remain. A bruise that refuses to yellow.

People call me crazy, but something passed between us— a tremor, an unnamed heat. You felt it. You did. Some obscure weather moved in both our bones.

Look at me, still orbiting you. Look at you, still letting me. You say yes to rooftops and cheap drinks with my friends, yes to plans even when the plans collapse— tiny yesses that braid themselves into hope.

It overwhelms me: you, still the nucleus and me, still believing I’ve carved a small, flickering corner in you. I don’t need a cathedral— a cupboard of space is enough.

And even if you never say it, I know my silence would sting you. You would stop. You would notice the absence. And that is its own kind of love.

There are people I’m meant to outgrow— husk-people, lesson-people— but not you. Never you. Your pretty face is an omen I keep reading wrong and right at the same time.

Our purpose isn’t finished. Something is still ripening in the dark. Call me mad, call me a delusion whisperer— but the universe has its clandestine ways. Maybe not today, but one day it will press you and me together into the shape I have always imagined— the shape we have been orbiting all along.

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