I Don’t Want To Be Loved. I Just Want To Be Untangled.
My heart itself is already in tangles. A web of nonsense and a drawerful of necklace chains that I will never have the patience to separate. I am sounds mixed with different mediums of light. Six thousand eight hundreddialects of flesh that I don’t have enough time to translate into words. This dictionary of skin is unreadable and Latin is dead because of what we never had the balls to tell each other.
I am swearing off of love because everything inside of me is oil and vinegar and I no longer believe that it’s morally correct to fall in love with the intent of both destroying and rebuilding another human being. I am a forest fire and an ocean, and my favorite color is the same as the color that hurts me the most.
I don’t want your sentimentality. Quit looking at me intending to melt me. We all know it’s working. We all know what this heart is capable of unfolding.
I am not as strong as my words pretend to be. Not as quiet as these caesuras promise. This heart is a patchwork quilt of people that leave different shades of blue inside of me.
The drowning. Your skies. The outline of a blue jay on a porcelain plate.
For now, I am closing off these bones for someone who will know how to trace me without me ever telling them what I look like naked.
I no longer want to seduce the words out of people just to see if I can. The love that I’m looking for falls out of the realm of your lips and my lips and our lips doing a dance that involves bodies and more skin and your hair touching mine, gently, like two windscolliding.
It’s too much to handle when I’m already having difficulties breathing and keeping track of my heartbeats and making sure that my limbs are doing what they need to be doing.
Because love is so beautiful.
But this heart is so fragile.
I am every vulnerability that the thesaurus has to offer me and in a certain light it’s impossible for me not to pull you towards me with the intent of kissing the very life out of you.
What I’m trying to say is that you are not allowed in. What I’m trying to say is that all I want is to open myself up and have you rearrange me, untangle the gold chains of my heart, love me for every shade of blue that I have hidden in the silent spaces between parentheses.
I have sworn off of falling in love,
but I know that in the morning, outside, in the pale frost of February,
all I’ll want is to hold another person’s hand, warm and gloved, in their coat’s pocket.”
