WORDS

fictions for love part 5 of 7

part five is nothing special. it is a wound. it is a constant tear on the silken inside of my cheek, the copper taste that lingers. it is being so tired that you are every word that slips through my teeth. it is something that never heals, it is everything that is wrong. it is guilt and shame and an old distrust that was born the first time you said you knew me well enough to break me entirely. it is empty streets at night, and watching planes in the sky above them. it is paper cuts and waking up from a night we never slept through. it is a broken teacup, a hundred pages of notebook paper, an interminable distance of a little more than six miles. and it is something insidious, overwrought, and far too delicate. 

it is far too far for far too long. 

i am going to put on rainboots and a hoodie and let my grumpy chickens out into the puddles. 

fictions for love part 4 of 7

i can fall sickeningly in love with everything in the space of a breath, sometimes less. 

and the whole time, i’m tearing you apart in my head for being everything that i could never fall in love with all at once. and for not being there. but i forget, always endlessly, that you really are there: because you are the feeling of running too fast for too long, and of stepping on a stray rose vine that has grown unseen across the lawn, of the aching comfort in giving up and giving up again. whenever you make me smile too much i have to say at least two bitter things to make up for it. what you don’t know is that your deceit, and your selfishness, and your cruelty, they all follow me into every room. 

fictions for love part 3 of 7

fictions for love part 2 of 7

today is the kind of day you would give anything to be here for. i know it. but you’re far away and in that distance is the deadening breath of translucent waves that will never, ever stop. but here, the walls have been receding since morning, and the rooms have opened up to the breeze and sunlight and the sound of the cardinals fighting for the thorny tree. the curtains are alive, and they are whispering to each other, and their voices are growing with the scratches of the branches on the roof. you are nothing here but old scars that i have kept on my skin as fading vestiges. 

these words are spoken, indelibly, the sun is getting into my eyes: i miss the trauma and the desperation most of all. but i miss the sleeplessness, and how the car would bring us home. i miss the cold, and the taste of my own teeth that i could not keep from splitting my lips, i miss how you could never stop scribbling out injustices on scraps of paper and never stop forgiving me. i miss the agony of minutes, of silence, and how we were both just waiting to scream at each other but then you would get shy and kiss my hand and say something irrelevant about the latest war. 

(currently my head is a mess of otherworldly, collapsing, inconsequential details) 

fictions for love part 1 of 7

why am i awake listening to the birds get louder and louder.

sometimes i tell my car, ‘okay, you have a safe parking spot, and you can rest all day tomorrow.’