i commit you to the ocean.

i will be brave.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

curtain time.

it gets too dark in here.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

they sleep next to you now

do you remember when the monsters could only live under your bed?

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

silence & hornets

you will learn to forgive yourself.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

titanic

you appeared and i wrecked you.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

where else can i go but the great beyond?

if you blink, you’ll miss it

those days when love was greatest for you

and you could breathe it still

without your chest getting tight

but here we are again

at the top of the ferris wheel and

it isn’t fair that you were the one who did wrong

while i am left with the trauma of burying the dead.

what were we ever trying to fight, anyway?

we stood facing away from each other

like we had something to prove

and the garden grew between us,

thick and heady.

i’ve taken to calling myself an ocean

when there was still land at my back

and the wide wide waters in front of me.

i look both ways before falling in love.

i walk only in the night and i pray i stay safe.

i don’t remember what love feels like.

is it an open wound or a healing secret?

is love still love if it’s a shame? is love still love if it tells you lies?

a traitor

by any other name would still

sink their teeth into you, fill up your ribs with

interlocking fingers like a promise

of safety while

fraying the strings that held you together.

there is a rage in me that won’t quiet.

there is a hurt in me i can’t quite forget

and some days i feel so, so sad.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

just a little bit.

i don’t want to hear you’re sorry. i just kind of want to hear you’re dead.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

go safely

when does a ghost become memory?

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

on distance

this is how the distance kills you  and this is how the kilometres stretch across your skin like little scales on a map too uniform to measure out your longing. they run down your hands that are always empty and across the spaces to someone whose hands may or may not be collecting the moments you couldn't be bothered to count. you only know that they all fall under the category of another time when i was alone. you take walks. or try to. you end up sitting by your front door, shoes half-laced, and you tell yourself that this is only the first time, that you are allowed time to dissipate and wonder how many synonyms there are for lost. you look for your motivation like it's something you care about. the distance grows by minutes, by the blankets that still smell of him, by the tire tracks in the snow, by the shirt he forgot or that you stole. you can never quite remember anymore. there are days when he leaves you behind and you are lost in the snowbanks, stumbling after receding taillights, and there are hours when you think about what safe must have felt like before him. you realise you have no idea. so you quietly let him take himself away from you, as if leaving was the only thing he could do, and he pulls at the skin beneath your throat and excises the muscle beneath your ribcage. you look up alive in the dictionary. you pretend your hands are full.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

thirty-four.

i was a poem before i met you. i will still be one after.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

you don't know what it's like.

i hope she makes you cry.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

just stop talking.

you make my words so angry.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

the only way to survive

you say you couldn’t see it coming. even though you half-knew how this was going to end, knew that it would never hold, it still comes like a volcanic eruption, like a flash flood—you lose everything but with just enough warning to survive. you stand up so fast the chair clatters to the floor behind you and you don’t care and the only thing you are allowed to do is walk out the door: if you look back, you are lost. if you look back, you are just a pillar of salt. you are mostly water anyway. so what if you turn into the ocean? so what if the ocean turns into you? your grief is in the waves; your grief keeps coming back and back and back  in the months that follow there are things that still blindside you, there are places you cannot visit which draw you like fire to oil. you are the city burning and you are adding salt to your wounds, you are all tears and you are hurting yourself but you keep coming back and back and back.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

thirty-three.

it is already october and i have laid out my ghosts for you.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

thirty-two.

sometimes i still cry when i think of you and how soft i used to be. i don't know that i miss you, but i wanted you to stay with your tainted hands, your lying tongue, gunshot promises empty and cold and god damn it, you should have told me you were only passing through.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

thirty-one.

have faith your strength is real

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

30

when you feel like you are going to drown remember that you are three-parts water and all fire inside a child of the ocean with defiance in her veins. you thought it would make you feel better but all it did was make you angry at the parts of your brain that hold on to things better than others' do, that relives things over and over and over again; your most desperate wish, your most vivid nightmare. do not give in. when your mind is shouting at you, shout back you are stronger than this. you are stronger than this. you are stronger than this.

[sadsongsforlonelybees]

29

this is the moment when things began unravelling:

i was there, heart in hand, leaking something awful, the loneliness on one shoulder and the fear of it on the other, both telling me to go, both telling me the leaving is easy.

I tried to stay.

you were there, phone in hand, heart somewhere else, telling me you cared, telling me it was time for a drink to stave off the terror, never really listening.

you told me to stay when you had no intention of doing the same.

--

here is how i fought and here is how i won:

both without you.