#julyinterrupted

[julyinterrupted]

You are so beautiful it knocks the wind out of me every day and I don't know how I ever lived before you strung my sky.

[julyinterrupted]

it was cloudy and you were dropping me off at the hospital. you put your car into reverse on accident and swore loudly. eyes fixed upon mine with a flash of sudden shame at the way i started at your outburst, silently mouthing an apology. typically so soft spoken, loud with ink splatters and music that reverberated through the ground; i saw you cry for the first time, quiet and bitter, when you shaved your head. it grew back dark but unkempt.

when i finally came out through sterile sliding doors bandaged and so weak i felt effervescently high, i was shocked to see your car still at the curb; i bawled with such force that i wrung every last tear out of my desiccated teetering body. you waited for me. four words i’ve only ever formed with quivering breath. you never smiled fully and only ever with the right side of your mouth, and you slept on the floor by my bed for a week after, and you held my hair back when i filled out and nearly weighed a hundred pounds. a triple digit weight is a death sentence to a girl so you strummed my broken ukulele as we sat, sprawled out on the bathroom floor, until i laughed.

you would always run the edges of your nails down my forearm and the last time i saw you it was nothing short of betrayal; we argued and you rifled through my journals when i slept, and i watched the horizon recede as you stood brazen against the skyline, mouth firmly set.

[julyinterrupted]

just thoughts

almost cried on the drive home. life is finally starting to feel familiar again.

a house is a place you grow accustomed to, but a home is familiar and it’s been ages since i’ve had a home.

home smells clean, like soap and open windows and sunlit cotton, and i never forgot the scent of your clothes the first time we kissed. it lingered on my skin like a childhood in the dirt; for years i prayed to God i could feel safe someplace and now i sit in the still.

[julyinterrupted]

the first time my mother told me to be sexier, i was 8, and i knew then i didn’t ever want to become a woman. it was always, take off your glasses, stand straight and arch your back, get your way. and sure those things came naturally with growing up, but in the process i lost my own body in weight and autonomy. like maybe a fifteen year old girl shouldn’t sneak alcohol and wrestle with boys she grew up with but is it solely because she’s an almost-woman? woman enough to be pinned down in the back of a sedan sobbing but i’d never even been above a hundred pounds at that age because i was so scared of developing into a body of the lesser sex, ready to be grown but just not physically and the world laughed in my face, and forced me to look my age in the eye.

[julyinterrupted]

we rowed into the reeds under the hot july sun to place permanent kisses away from prying eyes

[julyinterrupted]

i’ve gone everywhere but i’ve got nowhere to come back to

[julyinterrupted]

It comes back to the childhood summers I spent picking blackberries, spending my days itching to stay every hour of daylight among the sun-dappled leaves, light filtering to the quiet forest floor, cold earth cratering around the toes of my shoes as I dug in. Solitary and embraced by thorns and brambles, my fingers stained with the blood of unwashed berries I furtively stole bites of.

You are the tallest fruit of all, blooming across my lips, leaves outstretched and flowering against the sky.