I am still learning how to fill the gaps of the pieces you took when you left
all of the skin you traced knows it will never feel you again
and I like to believe your fingers are aching and your stomach hurts remembering the loss of me
I hope you make something worthy of all your regret
I bet it hurts to know you'll never know the girl that I'm becoming

There’s a certain safety in lukewarm love
in the thoughts I never speak, you are the first to leave
we lay in bed with only our backs facing each other
is this how it’s supposed to feel?
I’d never admit it but I stopped missing you when you’re gone
maybe it’s time we admit dependency is not the same as intimacy

my poetry isn't about you anymore
and I'll be the first to admit there was a time where my mind could only piece together thoughts of you
and words fell from my mouth unwittingly
with nothing but metaphors
to romanticise the way you left
but I won't belittle all this world has to offer again
by thinking you are all there is
I used to think I was born with heartbreak in my blood
but I've realized I keep running towards it mistaking it for love

I’m beginning to forget the difference between your body and mine
hold me close to your sunlight
you are the gentlest of all the gentle things
I love you without exception

press your tattoos against me
until they rub off on my skin
we have built something bigger than this sadness
drink me in like a well aged bottle of cabernet
you’re my favorite escape from the madness

I hope you are not frightened by the fingerprints of my past
my biggest fear is losing you to their ghosts
that my body will seem less holy after you hear of all its journeys
I’m sorry that the paths you trace aren’t uncharted territory
that his hands felt the shape of my hips before yours
I hope you understand the mistakes I made when I was feeling too much
when I learned to close my open heart
I will make everything new for you

there are days where I worry I have done nothing but tangle myself in regrets
I keep writing poems about my past hoping to cleanse it out of my system
because most days I feel more shame than growth and I forget what all of the rain was for
I was almost better, but almost doesn't count for much
I'm tired of watching the sun rise and fall from the same place hoping somone will save me from myself
my thoughts are so loud I'm burying myself in them
but something inside of me has survived all of the suffering and still wants to carry on
something in me knows that this is not the end

I'm in the mood to remember you
legs crossed over yours;
I can't see the moon without thinking of the way it looked through your windshield
safety is your locked car in an empty parking lot
and your hands dancing on my shoulder
I trace the lines on my body the way your fingers used to
and dance across the carpet to the songs you used to play
I hope your plans and your future have saved a place for me

Someday, when I’m older, my daydreams won’t be daydreams anymore.
The morning sun will dance across my bare skin in my third floor apartment.
Photos in film line my bedside table and life’s so sweet I hardly reach for my phone.
We dance on wooden floors to Van Morrison’s ‘tupelo honey’ and the sugar in my coffee falls short in comparison to the love we make.

Sometimes I think you got the worst of me. A product of emotional abuse, a consequence of all my longing, the effect of both trauma and growing older. I wish there had been a forewarning, that I could’ve prepared myself for the time I really met you. I was high and sad and alone and I don’t want you to think of me as sad. But I was tired and frail and full of so much anger and resentment. I never looked more like my mother. You don’t know me; the dreamer, or me; the happy girl dancing in her room to music I know you’d like. He never liked my taste in music. And I think of a way to prove it to you, to somehow show you I am more than the culmination of everything he’s put me through. but I don’t know how to make someone believe in a me they’ve never seen exist. And I wonder if my life is now going to be a product of all the hurt you saw in me. I wonder if I’ll ever actually be brave, because brave girls don’t stay when he says mean things. I think I would’ve left if you asked me to, but I know there’s only so much a person can do with someone full of pain before they’re consumed by it. I can be better, I promise.

I'm getting comfortable with coming home to myself
I can turn right at the stop sign onto my street and I don't miss the times you were waiting there for me
but on Sunday I realized I still have a key to your apartment
and I'm sorry for being the reason you know what losing someone tastes like
there's still two toothbrushes by your sink and I hope we're both coming to terms with the things not meant for us
you deserve more than my hesitations

We planned seven ways to spend the rest of our life the night we met
I borrowed your passenger seat and the inside of your palms
And I still know your hands beneath the blankets, fingers searching for mine
Los Angeles isn’t cold in June but any excuse to be closer to you
somehow 2,000 miles never tainted the longing I had to know you better

You kept a toothbrush by her sink and our phone calls a secret
Grief comes, unaware of the distance
It makes my knees weak and face hot at the thought of my ignorance
Because it wasn’t a moment of weakness, and it wasn’t a mistake
It was 6 months of loving someone who belonged to someone else, blissfully unaware of my fate
Anger turns to sadness turns to anger again

And I know the scars from biting my tongue will heal
And I know my name tastes bitter in your mouth
And I know I’m not the one to blame

The most beautiful part of me is where I’m headed, and it’s a shame you’ll never get to meet me there

I prayed for something softer
I clinged to something simple
but you know me, I'm a hopeless romantic for tragedy
what is love if it doesn't leave me with bruises in the shape of your lips
and longing in the form of closure

for me it will always be you
and for you it will always be her
your smile
her eyes
your fingertips
her bedsheets
your words
her touch
and she will always come back but she will never choose you
and you will always want me but you will never let her go

I lay awake and I think about the way feelings taste differently
the way every kiss before yours tasted bitter and nonchalant
the day grows dim and I don't know how to think of anything but you
I envy the pillow holding your head and the sheets wrapped in your body
It's 2 am and I swear I can still hear you after all of this time

I can’t imagine myself without my longing
call it infatuation or blind optimism
while my suitors may have changed, this feeling seems to follow me through the milestones
find me in the dead of night, breaking my own heart
searching for a hero

I know it may be an unusual time for a love poem.
But rain is hitting the roof tiles like piano keys,
the scent of coffee beans wakes me up slowly, and somehow, you make me feel innocent again.
I wince at all of the versions of me that have led to present tense.
But somehow, I already know you won’t mind.
I won’t tell you yet about where I’ve been
but you’ll smile when I say I think winter is the prettiest time to watch things grow.
How unexpected, you and the flowers both.

If I stripped all of my prettiness away and showed you the darkest parts of my heart
would you still want to stay?
It’s exhausting trying so hard to be liked.
I want to be loved.
And for more than just the way I look naked and tangled in hotel sheets.

If I fall in love with the comfort of having you around and you fall in love with the shape of my body in your bed what do we really have?
Paint a picture of our lives thirty years from now and what do we have but dried up lust and wrinkles on our forehead?

Ours is not the rocking chairs and coffee on our front porch kind of fondness.
It’s the late nights and two bottles of wine and the dragging our feet to ripping the band-aid off because we both know where it’s headed.

all my greatest hurt reminds me of you
you ask me how I’m doing and I try not to spill my heart out in the front seat of your car
because then you wouldn’t want to see me again
and I’ve missed you for so many nights
you feel so close until you aren’t
and I always seem to find myself reaching for your ghosts around this time of day
you’re the only person I could miss while you’re sitting right across from me

I dream of you in shades of green.
Forgetting you is a different kind of growing pain.
The skin I’m in may be different than when you held it, but my bones are the same and they seem to still be aching for you

And while the better part of me is certain you were never meant to be more than a daydream, I can’t bare to tell myself it’s time to stop waiting for you.

shame makes it's way in-between my sheets
and you'd think by now I'd learnt how to tell it no
it's in the too much to drink when my words start to slip
in the tendency to stay when I should've been long gone
in the begging on my knees when I should've let them leave
she latches onto the hem of my frayed jeans
and reminds me of my past
she holds my stomach upside down
and stops all of my sleep

I will open my scabs and make them a garden before they have a chance to leave a scar on me.

-you don’t get to mark my body

This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to prolong walking away from a man you know isn’t capable of loving you in the way you deserve. You’re going to cry. And you’re going to beg. And you’re going to become a shell of a human being for someone who leaves bruises beneath your skin, not with his hands, but with the words “*****” and “insecure”.  He’s going to kick your front door down when he comes home too drunk and you’re going to pretend he’s not just like your Father. You’re going to hold his head up while he pushes you off of him to make sure he can breathe, and you’re going to look at his phone to find the name of another woman while you’re carrying him to your bed. You’re going to break. And you’re going to tell him you’re leaving while you’re secretly praying he asks you to stay. And he will, because he always does, and you’re going to leave anyway.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to bubble wrap your vases and fold your winter coats with a knot in your throat. You’re going to call your mother crying; telling her you’re coming home. You’re going to tell her and all of your friends about the peace you have now with a pit in your stomach, hoping if you repeat the words enough you’ll believe them. Peace. Peace. Peace. What he never gave you. Safe. I want to feel safe. I don’t feel safe with him or without him. I feel safer here.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to let another man touch you because maybe they’ll erase the tattoos his mouth left on your body. Maybe if you transform into the “cool” girl no one can ever hurt you. Maybe if enough people tell you you’re ****, and smart, and too good for him you’ll start to feel like you haven’t lost anything at all. The problem is it isn’t him that you lost. It’s all the little pieces of yourself you’re trying to reignite, it’s the broken parts of you that entangled with the broken parts of him. But the broken parts of you don’t hurt the people they’re supposed to love. And another man’s hands aren’t going to rip into your skin and put stitches in the places you let him in. So you’re going to be lonely. And this is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to fall back into him, maybe more than once. Because when you’re not with him you’re romanticizing him and that’s a habit harder to break than you originally thought. Because you’ll see him, and he’ll feel so good. In the middle of all his longing, in the way he looks at you. And then he’ll yell at you and curse at you and you’ll realize he hasn’t changed at all. He’s not going to change. Men like that don’t change. It’s okay that it took you longer than you hoped to figure this out. This time might hurt more than the first. It’s the release of hope, the release of the last sliver of you that thought there might be a life where you work out. There’s not. This is heartbreak. And it is raw and real and ugly and it feels like your bones are breaking with no one watching.
This is how you’re going to heal.
You’re going to be alone and it is going to feel like coming up for air. You’re going to listen to the music you used to love and write words that slowly heal you. You’re going to find pieces of yourself you had buried to appease him. You’re going to light candles in your bedroom and fall asleep without wondering what bed he lies in. And in time you’ll realize you hardly think of him at all. The bitterness within you quietly releases itself as you realize his inability to love you well has nothing to do with your worthiness, and everything to do with the demons within him he refuses to face. You cannot heal someone that doesn’t want to be healed. You cannot love someone into becoming the potential you see in them. And that is okay.
This is how you’re going to heal.

A man who loves you won’t call you a *****
or a *****, or say you’re crazy, or say you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to him
and ******* 2 hours later like somehow that will  undo the memories inside your brain of all the ugly words he’s ever said
So why am I stuck in a limbo of knowing this isn’t what I’m supposed to be spending my life like and staying because it’s comfortable
Maybe if I loved you less you wouldn’t resent me so much
Maybe if I was a little less of this and a little more of that you’d hold my hand in the car on the way to dinner
Why does loving you feel like muscle memory to me
Why does hating you feel like breathing
Why don’t I hate you enough to walk away
Maybe I’m afraid loving someone else would feel too safe after all of the wars I’ve fought with you

I want to see your headlights cut through my living room window, hear your knock on my front door; aggressive and hurried. I want to watch you slip off your shoes and toss your duffel bag across my 8x10 room. Kiss my neck and tell me how hard you tried not to think of me. Tell me about your new hobbies, the distractions that didn’t stick. Tell me about all the things you’ve seen without me and how none of it meant anything at all. Throw yourself onto my living room couch, settle into the indent you left behind as though time had never passed. You tell me we were crazy to ever walk away from this. That you can’t stand the idea of growing without me, that love is somehow enough to save us from ourselves.

I made a list of things that remind me of you.
There was a knot in my throat but a grin on my face when I thought of dinosaur sheets and the beach in October.
Your mother’s back yard and the shape of your favorite sunglasses and the tea I’ve made every night since the last time I saw you.
What a delicate, terrifying thing to love and be loved back.
What a wonderful thing you are to miss.
My heart has grown softer as I’ve gotten older and I hope the world is gentle to you.
I hope you find a love as great as ours felt without all of the barriers but I hope you don’t find it too soon.

Isn’t it strange? How eventually we all become a slave to our sadness? All I’ve ever known is children full of longing and adults full of cynicism. It’s a means to survival and I recognize that. But who am I if not a child full of hope believing that eventually things will be the way I imagined them to be? Who am I without the trust that good is someday rewarded? Who am I without the fairytale ending with the man that saved me from it all? I want to believe it’s him. I know that it’s him. But who am I apart from finding my identity in the trauma of it all? Who am I if I’m not in survival mode? Maybe the idea of it all scares me more than I realize. As if I have nothing to offer if it isn’t the broken parts of me. As if I’ve got nothing interesting to say if it isn’t pertaining to the things I’ve been through. As if I’m nothing except the way been burned.

In another life, I’m folding laundry and hear you singing to our daughter in the next room. You are steady and I don’t feel like I’m living something I need to escape from.
In another life, I cook and you clean and we laugh at the kids we used to be. You bring me coffee in bed on Sunday mornings and never get exhausted of me telling you how much I love you.
In another life, our love isn’t dependent on either of us healing and we never reach a season where we have to walk away.
In another life, you find your way to me and I to you and being with you is the easiest part of existing.

You touched me like you saw God.
Like getting close to me might save you.
And I let you.
Not because I was weak,
but because I had nothing to prove.

You read my softness like an invitation.
Treated it like a guarantee.
Took what you wanted and left
like I wouldn’t notice the silence.

I’m sorry the world hardened you
into someone more concerned
with how you’re perceived
than how you make people feel.
And I’m sorry—
that because of that,
you’ve lost me.

I am shedding the need to be understood, peeling off the layers of over-explaining, and softening the urge to convince anyone that I’m worth staying for. I don’t crave being liked the way I used to. I won’t twist myself to be digestible.
There’s comfort now in the solitude. Not the aching kind, but the kind that feels like a deep exhale. Like coming home to myself.
Isn’t it funny? To create the life you once begged the universe for? If I don’t stop to remind myself, I’ll forget how far I’ve come. From questioning why I wasn’t enough, to now knowing the way someone makes me feel is far more important than whether they find me comfortable or not. From crying on bathroom floors, begging for men to love me, to feeling so sure of who and what I am, no one can take that away from me. From settling for lukewarm, could’ve-been-a-lifetime-of-fine love, to unwilling to accept anything less than the kind of love elementary school me dreamt about. From anxiety and masks to peace and solace.
Growth comes in waves, and I am still finding my way. But isn’t it beautiful to watch yourself become.