What if God had given you to me as a man? Did it hurt him to know that I could not follow you into whatever despair you crawled into because he had not given me wings like yours, a soul like yours? Do you think he knew about the war in your heart or how I wasn’t supposed to survive it? What if your hand wasn’t permanently resting on my shoulder like an angry scar? Tell me what it would be like if the world didn’t end every time we turned our backs on each other, if I asked you to stay and you listened. Did it hurt when the angels tore you away? Did you find yourself in other things? Did you kiss other women like early mornings? Or was it my face you saw every time someone else tried to love you? What if i didn’t spend my days thinking of ways to put my mouth on yours? What if I didn’t have a theory on what you taste like? Ash and some impossible light that can’t be touched, only felt. I am trying to find my way to you in the kingdom only there are brick walls instead of roads, only there are guns here. They don’t keep dandelions or wishes, but if they did, I would wish for your hands, always your hands. I am pretending your fists are kisses. I am waiting for you to put your arms down and come back to me. What if all my prayers did not start with your name? I loved you through the blood in my mouth and forgave the emptiness that you left because even after the hurt and all the teeth, I think of you when I think of home. I think of you and a wide-eyed boy with holy wars moving beneath his skin. It all started with burning, and I know we promised we wouldn’t talk about salvation but I feel it when I look at you and it is too much like an ending. What if we did not ruin everything we touched? What if we stopped being sorry for the things we couldn’t save, like each other, like the wide-eyed boy I carried out of a burning building, and even then I didn’t really save him, and even then, he never blamed me because he was too busy blaming himself. And you, you were throwing yourself in front of any hurt that could come towards me like a car crash so that was how we loved, like collateral damage. What if we were selfish? What if we let the world catch fire and saved ourselves? What if love is made of burning things? What if its not? But what if it was just all we could manage? What if the fire was all we could have? Do you know that I’d take it anyway? That I’d take you in any way I could, even if our hearts fell out of the wreckages of our broken bodies? We are not human, we are fallen cities and we are only trying to stand up straight.
An Infinite List of What-If’s, by Azra and Caitlyn (via alonesomes)
