maybe you'll get lucky and you'll be someone like I used to know who gets to say "nothing really bad had ever happened to me"
maybe you'll get lucky and be someone like I thought I was who gets to say "yeah, it was bad, but I'm fine"

maybe you'll be thirteen and it'll all happen way too fast.

maybe you'll be fourteen and perfect will go downhill so steeply you'll break every bone as you tumble down.

maybe at fifteen you'll learn loss like you shouldn't have known for decades, and then spend your time convincing yourself not to die.

maybe you'll be sixteen and endure a goodbye so horribly complicated that you won't be able to make sense of it, and you'll give up trying. maybe that year you'll find your favorite hello.

maybe seventeen brings your fiercest love and your biggest fall and your hardest crash. seventeen leaves you crawling, bloodied, into the safest place you can find.

maybe then you're questioning that this isn't the way it should be. maybe you're asking why it all had to happen to you.



maybe you spend three years in your own head, trying to escape, numbing yourself over and over, and for your own sanity, blocking everything out.

eighteen.

nineteen.

twenty.



maybe you'll be twenty-one when it all finally hits you. maybe the "you're too young for this" you heard at thirteen finally makes sense. the "are you sure you're okay?"'s of fourteen will echo in your head. you'll hear your fifteen year old self shrugging off the shock of "you're sure handling this well". and you will know now you never handled it at all.

you will feel it all at twenty-one, a little more every day. maybe your mind was protecting you until now. maybe now you're thinking you can handle it. you can't. you aren't ready. you wish it would go away.

maybe it will.

there will be days your hands feel weak and it will hurt your legs to walk forward, your skin will feel ready to break and your head will feel so heavy on your shoulders. there will be moments you talk yourself into giving up, there will be moments when you settle for the best you could do. there will be lovers that make you feel like you already gave up, there will be one lover who will always love you best. she'll make your skin stronger. there are going to be days and sometimes longer stretches of weeks and months when you will crave nothingness and you will feel like you have failed when you have not. you don't have to always give your best. it's okay that you don't have the energy to sprint towards perfection every day. you are sad and you are loved and you are lovely though you'd disagree, you are in pain and doing your best to be okay. it's okay.

You found me entangled in nothing after you lost me a few years ago. I'm so content for the first time time to be blissfully existing in your love, I'm so finally happy, living between the moments when we both need each other and the ones we comfortably know love. I'm yours no matter how long you are mine. I can hope for eternity while my heart knows you'll never leave.

Burning gas and my lungs is better than sitting alone with all the empty time to think
Think about the tears and layers of neosporin that you went through trying desperately to make the lines heal without a trace
Trace the lines of her face on the cold screen because it makes you feel closer to her somehow
Somehow you're carrying on, you feel weight of the universe on your shoulders and you're too dizzy to stand much longer
Longer than the miles between seems to be the time until you next have her in your arms
Arms that are weary and sore and cut up, but they still pull and reach and grab and push
Push everyone away until you're alone again, bridges are what you're best at burning.

distance
depression
desperation

She's got a bit of understanding of me in her pocket, though she's never treated me like Margo Roth Spiegelman or Alaska Young, but I so appreciate that she knows I am not ordinary either. She won't ever know the ways that I love her for loving me when I fall short. Over time, maybe I can make her understand that I spent three years being treated like a normal girl, my broken shards swept aside and the rest of myself glossed over with a simple layer of facade and denial, and I embraced it, and it took something from me quite incredibly devastating. I spent my growing up years being treated like there was no hope for me. But she loves my heart, knowing all it's debilitating flaws. Though I was once some terrible, selfish child, she loved me through it. I am miraculously confident that even one day when she comes to know how much strength it took to learn to speak on the phone without wanting to cry, and that I still have a lot of trouble looking other humans in the eye, and almost every day, I smoke cigarettes and listen to loud music until I give myself headaches, and I just really don't care... I believe she will still love me. She doesn't see me as weak as I see myself. I hope she knows I call her angel because looking back now, I know she's saved me a hundred times over. While I'm not quite sure yet how to exist in a love like this, the way love should have always been, I am eternally grateful.

Leaving cigarette ashes all up and down I-40 for nearly 900 miles. I just got done breathing you in enough to last me for 31 days and all I want is to go back to sleep in the curve of your body. I can't help but feel this drive would go much faster if you were in the seat to my right, but I'll keep barreling down this road, alone, headed home, but I'm not sure I can call it that it that, because no one there understands that I didn't take my heart with me when I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, and I'll never know the right words to explain why  I am so low when I return with the smell of your embrace still on my clothes, and I can still feel your flesh burning fresh in my mind. And I know that my mother is worried about my heart but I can't figure out how to make her realize that this is different, this is it, you're it, you're mine, you are my future. And I know better than anyone that you were always meant for me. Distance is not for the untrue love. The truth is, angel, I am feeling again and that is because of you. I feel every moment I am not next to you and, oh God, how I feel every second in your arms. Darling, I want you to know how much I hate the space between us. At least as I head back to Carolina, I know I'll be searching for a place we can hide away together. I can feel the miles growing and hurting but I also know that we can be strong through them and through the time we're missing. You are my whole heart, you are my girl, my world, forever.