I think of you everyday still. The frequency wanes... It's all I can look forward to in light of what transpired; that a stranger will bring up a film we watched together, a comedian you showed me, the tiny town where you grew up- and I won't linger too long on the aftertaste of the mention of you. Just, you know, the real part. Your crooked smile, lazy eye just behind that swoop of hair. How your jeans fit over your hips, your bowed chuck taylors, your ridiculous cackle.

Now that someone else gets to enjoy those inanities, I guess I don't have to.

I love you. And when I say it, I mean it. It's not apologetic, or consolatory, or conditional.
When you said it to me I didn't know whether to cry relieved tears of joy or punch a wall. I'd almost rather smash my own hand then let you keep breaking my heart.
There are days when I'm okay with it all, and then there are days when I fall to pieces- and wish that you'd never kissed me, that you were just still the boy who'd look longingly in my direction for too long at parties. I can't remember the last time I ...
The hope was pleasant and peaceful, now there's just gray tumult. And, oh, it hurts and tires me so to be but sea-foam in your wake...

this i know

After years of affliction, hitherto a short lifetime of remorse and chagrin, my roots are planted, and not in sorrow, but in hope. My swaying sadness is just a sometimes sour affectation of my somber psyche, but it does not define me. When I've broken, I've been renewed. When my brain told me to not go on, I did it anyway. When it tried to persuade me to not love or let in again, I did. Over and over thus haven't I swelled and collapsed? And not in just one way, but many?

Of course there will be those cobwebbed corners. The stow-away compartments of dusty dreams it took so long to slough away from the forefront. Of course you'll never know the girl on stage. Of course I am a delicate woman. And of course you would be the person I would love to tell about the darknesses, the sweepy dreamy mists I hide from the daylight. The unnameable fears, the macabre romances with dead songs, eulogies of the incarnations I have been. Of course I would want you to know about the weaknesses- because I want you to know the closest to my present self as I can share.

I am not my words or songs- they are merely an apostrophe of something I maybe once had been, a veil engineered by a ghostly unseen monster of a previous swirling Fall.

I am not a wounded dove. I yearn to be loved, I long to belong. But the desperation you sense is not in the desire of the attainment, but in the wait. And that is inevitable, and nigh. Because I am whole, and giving, and open. And whoever is worthy of that scope of tenderness will meet me there.