and i will wait for you here on the other side, where the earth and her fields await the footsteps of that girl who dared to swallow pomegranate seeds — each one holding a tenfold of unsaid apologies. i will wait for you here, where the storms i brewed found themselves pressing against the softness of lilacs, where the nightfall forgives the sunset for leaving, where morning smells of teakwood and rain. and you will realize that each sigh does not have to weigh like a thousand bent bromeliads — that each breath does not have to ache in the presence of morning light. you will deserve every bit of softness you tried so hard to ****. you will deserve every bit of moment that doesn't hurt — someday, you'll get here and you'll know. you'll know.

— to my younger self

and i love you like this:

in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.

Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.

she had a darkness in her chest space shuttles hadn't explored.
it was said that stars died there.

this is how i'll let you go:

i'll open our photo albums for the last time, touch the yellow edges where your body ends, and not get drunk on what we could have been. i will wipe the coffee stains you left in perfect circles; sometimes, i pretend that they had the color of your eyes when the sunlight hits them. i will scrub your fingerprints off my spine; it's time for them to let me go too — slower, gentler than the way you did.

i will pass by your street, and not send you a bunch of paper rings engraved with all my overused metaphors. i will not hope you'll chase after me, wearing them over the promises we've broken, and over the promises we're yet to break. i will stay up late; midnights are somehow still for missing you, but i won't be writing anything. and we both know it kills me — not writing poems about you, when loving you and losing you are the closest things i ever got to call poetry.

instead, i'll hold on tight on every word that spills out of my mouth, seal them all in a trinket box buried in some place where we let romance die. i will fall asleep next to our cemeteries, wet from the rains we made; i might wake up at 3 am and not think of calling you. and i will wake up at 7 am, when it's still raining, and i will watch the early morning thunderstorms, and i won't wish you're back with it. i will sit there, free from the damp coffee stains and from the traces of your kiss. my tailbone will no longer recall the intricacy found in your fingerprints, and my eyes — they will have forgotten if yours were cobalt or turquoise or electric blue, 'cause darling, maybe it's too late to make you love me again, but it's not too late love myself.

sometimes, we all wish for the world to just stop spinning for a while; that we remain sixteen or nineteen forever — just dreaming of painting the marmoris of the sea and seeing it displayed in a museum. just dreaming of browsing bookstores — each book sinking into your effleurage, until you see that cream-colored cover with your name on the spine. just dreaming of hearing a song from a stranger's car, and call it your own. just dreaming of creating stories out of piano keys. just dreaming of discovering a star.

at least, if the world stopped spinning today, a dream can remain as a dream forever. it will never be another thing we messed up. it will never be another dream we lost.