I love ya.

Vanessa Laird, 20. Poetry.

[theminutesthatpass]

If there is anyone left behind after I have gone, I wonder which star they will see me as when they look up at the sky.

V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I look at everyone and see closed eyes, open mouths. An empty space where the heart should be.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

Desire is no gentle thing. I so badly want someone to love me--to know that I am a person that could be loved at all. My head has been full of constant fantasies of people falling in love with me since I was a child. Yes, the point in life is to love and be loved and my soul realized this many years before any other part of me did. Desire is no gentle thing. It will leech itself onto the deepest parts of your heart, wrap itself around your bones like a second flesh. And if you are a fool, like me, you will let it. When you want a thing so desperately, it is hard to realize for yourself that perhaps there is a reason you do not have it yet. A lot of the time human beings like me are more heart than head and it is hard to navigate through life when seeing through blurry eyes. Much of the time I have to remind myself I am not alone in this--in life. The people I love most would likely be better off without me and yet I am glad to feel connected enough to others to be able to love them as I do. It doesn’t matter how deeply it is returned, if it is returned at all. For months I have drowned in my own guilt, and wondered if my love was enough to make up for everything else I lack. There is much to make up for. The love must drip from my bones.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

and if I notice a time that I feel disconnected from the earth, is that not proof that I was connected? That I still am?

-V.L

[theminutesthatpass]

My own brain pits itself against me and my body is no different. The good things are only good for a moment and then are forgotten. It seems as if my body is trying to rot from the inside out. I have been thinking much of death lately and dreaming of him when I sleep, which, really, there is no difference between. I remember silly, pitiful things-- things that my brain decided to capture in the moment only so nostalgia could hold them against me in the future. My brain convinces me my sadness, my aching heart, is something I long to return to. It’s funny how much we trick ourselves into thinking we should not escape the grasp of things which should not have had a hold on us to begin with. It doesn’t matter how many times I have pulled myself from the abyss but I suppose it makes sense now why I end up back there so often.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

Some days are harder than others. I’m not sure what it says of me that still, even after nearly eight years, I think of you sometimes. I wonder why there are days where your ghost still haunts me. Some days, I pity the man who will eventually love me as I loved you. Because what if I am only able to see him in your shadow? What if I only love him because he loves me? I wonder if it is possible to fall in love with someone out of obligation. It sounds morbid but I wonder sometimes if you’re still alive. I mourned you as if you were not, which is to say that many of the boys I have known since have been trying to meet a ghost’s standards. And, really, how does a person do that? You were my ghost for the longest time and some days I can still feel you haunting the darkest parts of my heart. Nobody ever stands a chance when they’re competing for love against a ghost. I know this to be true because I see pieces of you in other people, even now. I have been wondering this for years now but I don’t know anymore if any of us ever are able to stop loving our ghosts-- not because of need but because ghosts never really leave.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

You are sick of poems about the body. I get it. I am sick of writing them. But where do I scream into silence when there never is any? Don’t you think I am more sick of being sick of my body than you are of poems about the body? You don’t understand. I imagine that in some other world my body is not the most important and also most painful part of my existence. I imagine that, in this world, I’d be beautiful without my body. So you are sick of poems about the body and everyone knows I am sick of body, but maybe the problem with the poem isn’t the poem at all; it’s the feeling. Perhaps the problem is that so many of us feel it in the first place. Do you understand? You are sick of poems about the body and I am sick of understanding them.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

Some days my body is the altar and some days the altar gets burnt to the ground. I dance on its ashes. Some days my body is the God I built the altar for. This is not to say that I think I’m a god, just that sometimes, in the cold of the wind, my body feels like its own force of nature. It’s just to say that sometimes my body feels like mine and I don’t know any word for that other than holy.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I live my life, one in which every poem I try to write becomes about my body. It’s the only thing I can think about anymore. My body is the one thing in my life that stays when I just want it to leave. My body is the one thing that stays around and yet also leaves me standing out front in the pouring rain. I want to kill myself. I mean I don’t. I mean I want to kill my body, to leave it in the middle of the sea to die alone. I mean I wish that my body was a thing I could take off, a thing I didn’t have to carry around. I feel as if my body is a room with no doors or windows. I don’t know how you are able to leave a room like that once it’s made. I was put in my body and all I can think about is how to get out. Is it so bad that I don’t want my body to be mine? I mean I hate waking up in the mornings or the middle of the night or at all. Being in this body feels like continuous doubt, like happy means smiling and smiling means please don’t look at me. Being in this body feels like continuously hoping nobody else sees me in the way that I see me. What am I to do with a feeling like that? What am I to do with my body when I wish it didn’t exist? I want to shed my skin and peel away the meat from my bones. I want so badly to be something that I’d whittle myself down into nothing and I think that’s the worst part.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I dream about being murdered, chased in the middle of the woods and the moonlight peering at me from the trees. Something in me needs to die or is already dying, is carving itself out of my body because I won’t do it myself. All I wanted was to stop feeling my body under my fingertips and now she hates me for it. All I wanted was to crawl out of my skin and into a different one, one that wasn’t mine and was, because of that, a better one. I’m dreaming of being murdered, removed from my body once and for all. I’d thought escaping my skin would feel better. I thought I’d be happy.

-V.L

[theminutesthatpass]

You use people up until there’s nothing left, suck the marrow out of their bones and ignore all of the screaming. What else are you supposed to do? But people get sick of people like you doing these types of things to them, and really what did you expect? Now that you’ve pushed them all away and they finally stopped trying to come back, you’re sad? Oh, silly. You don’t know what to do with yourself now besides drown in your emptiness. At least before you had their screams to cancel yours out. It’s a funny thing-- how you squeeze the knife and are surprised about the blood on your hands. You’d spent so long causing other people’s pain that you almost forgot about yours.

-V.L

[theminutesthatpass]

I sliced my finger open trying to pry open a can and watched the blood ooze out, the crimson rolling down the back of my arm. To say this is to say that the cause of my pain is not something that matters to me if I don’t see the cut. To say this is to say that my destruction is my own doing, that my love will one day also be my demise. What did I expect? I should know by now- Kindness never brought me anything good that stayed, that loved me as I loved it.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I fell asleep with dirt under my fingernails and your name beneath my tongue. I say I don’t know what I mean and what I mean is, I know what I mean but it’s hard for me to say it. You say you love me and what you mean is you love being loved. Why didn’t I see that from the beginning? I know now the reason it’s hard to get over someone who never loved you is because you wonder what it’d be like if they had. You’re more stuck on the idea that they could have loved you instead of the fact that they didn’t. How am I supposed to get past a thing like that? Where do I put the love down? I said I hated you and what I mean was I’m scared I never will.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

For a long time, I wanted happiness. I wanted things both good and holy. I wanted to break his heart and walk in the wind. I wanted to make myself a home out of the blood and gristle of his body, and I never wanted to live in it. I just wanted to be sure I knew what had become of him after me. It seemed like killing him would be the only way that I got that. I wanted the night to swallow me whole and I wanted to fill my body with the stars to see if I’d hate it less. I wanted to live and I wanted to die. I wanted to destroy the distance with my love and it turns out the roads don’t care about pain you feel. I wanted to fill the void and the void wanted to kill me. I wanted to love and be loved and I wanted my days to be filled with him. I also wanted to wring my bones dry of him. I wanted to push my body off a cliff and I wanted to wake up in it forever. Girls want these things. When I realized that happiness wasn’t a thing that I was meant to have, I stopped searching for it.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

My eyes burn, so I know I’m either about to cry or catch on fire. So I know I’m either about to die or say I love him and isn’t that just the same goddamn thing? My eyes burn, so I dig the palms of my hands into my eyelids until I’m seeing stars, until I’m seeing white even with my eyes closed. I wake up in the evenings and forget where I am. What day is it? When did I fall asleep? Who have I become while wallowing in the graves of all of the people I killed in me? Would they be proud of me? That doesn’t matter. They’re dead and I did it. My eyes burn, like I’m in the middle of the fire and I wonder if it’s me or them that’s burning. She tells me I can’t keep holding onto all of these dead things. But they are apart of me, so what then? Where do you bury the dead parts of a person when the person isn’t dead? Where do you dig the grave when the body’s still breathing? I wanted wind, something that could swallow me whole without killing me. Something that could make me fly without leaving the ground but I died before I could even find it. All I wanted was something to feel good about again.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I loved you, or I didn’t. It doesn’t matter anymore when I don’t love you now. It doesn’t matter anymore because you never loved me anyways. It doesn’t matter anymore. You don’t matter anymore. I know I said it before, that loving you was something I had to unteach myself and something like that is hard to do. I wanted to say I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to hold onto this emptiness for so long. I didn’t know what else to do with my hands once there was nothing left of you to hold onto. I’ve been thinking lately, turning myself into something both dead and alive to see if the world is still beautiful. It is. It is. I’ve been thinking lately, taking my heart and putting a little of it into my head. I’ve been lacking love lately, been seeing things badly when they weren’t that way. I’d like to say I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to make you into something so evil, to turn you into something I hated just so I’d feel something other than love for you. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter anymore. Love was a home I built us in and mine was not the kind you wanted. It’s okay. It happens. I hate how much I knew but sometimes I think I didn’t know enough of you. I was envious of anyone who ever saw you happy, of anyone who you ever loved. It was all I ever wanted. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I loved you. I’m sorry I loved you. It doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter anymore.

-V.L.

[theminutesthatpass]

I am a slave for this. I cut my own tongue off and splatter the blood on the pages, call it art. I break my own heart and he asks me what I did that for. I’m a slave for this. I destroy myself trying to speak how I feel, shove a hand into my lungs trying to figure out where the breathing stops working, where my lungs cave in on themselves. I set the paper in front of me and paint it with my guys, stain every inch and call it feeling. This is messy, making yourself into a disaster just to say how you feel. This isn’t easy- nothing honest ever is. I’m a slave for this. I shackle myself to the pen, never knowing something so light could make me feel so heavy. Somewhere between my heart and my hands, the pen takes me captive, rips me apart with the words it forms. I love many things and I’m sorry if you ever loved me. What it means to love someone like me is that even after you leave, you will still be here. What it means to be loved by someone like me is that I will paint the pages bloody with your name, over and over until the screaming stops. I’m a slave for this. I swallow the words I only ever say on paper and they swallow me whole, eat at me until my heart breaks. I do this and I’m no longer human. I do this and I turn myself into an animal on display, caging myself in the ink of the pen until I forget I’m alive. I unfold my soul on the floor, search through it trying to figure out when the beat of my heart stopped sounding like a heart and instead like a gunshot. I look at myself and see someone else. I tear my mind apart, push away all of the excess words until I see the hurt hiding in the corner. I tell it to come out for a moment, let me look at it, tell me how it feels. I’m a slave for this. I do this and my whole ground falls apart, crumbles at the touch of a pen. After I see the damage, I tell myself it’s okay, it must’ve not been too sturdy in the first place, tell myself I didn’t just destroy myself trying to put the feelings into words. I create chaos in places that there isn’t any, pull the sky to the ground ust to remember what it feels like to love something you love. I take my own eyes out because seeing is believing and I don’t know what to believe, put them at the center of my world to see what made me this way. I’m a slave for this. I pick up the pen and tell it I hate it, but then I make a symphony with his name written all over it and suddenly I love it just as much as I hate it. I dig out my heart, cover the pen in my blood and guts. I do this and my body doesn’t know the difference between love and hate. I do this and the contents of my head and heart are spilled all over the room. I cut off my ears, try to pass them off to someone else, shoving it into their and never telling them that it’s because I never know the difference between someone telling me what I want to hear or what I need to. I’m a slave for this. I always will be. One moment I worship the pen for the things it can create, and the next I’m cursing it for the things it makes me dig up, even long after I’ve buried them. I do this and suddenly my body stops being me and turns into a graveyard.

-V.L.