pack rat
mule
lugging around all the baggage
that’s me

I asked a guy who doesn't want anything except *** if we’d both be less ****** up about relationships if we both didn’t give so much to them.
If she didn’t deem it insufficient, I did everything I thought was right. I was trying so hard and it wasn’t enough for her. It wasn’t enough for her, and she wasn’t enough for me. I kept accepting crumbs, yet when you’re hungry enough you succumb to the starvation and eat whatever you are given.
*** was the bait and I was a naive ******* fish, hook line and sinker. I sunk alright. I morally justifiably caught and released through the messages that filled the void. I  led myself to believe “*** isn’t what makes a relationship thrive” meant if everything was shiny and sparkly then there isn’t any way it could be fool’s gold, right?
“How could I do it”, well, he had what I wanted and couldn’t get. When push came to shove she shoved me. I wish I wasn’t still heartbroken over a girl who made me feel like this. I had to walk on glass and now I am all scratched up. I told him clearly I was ****** in the head to send the messages and the pictures and justifying it all, it was unfair and wrong. For months I just felt the pressure to confess. I bust open my suitcases and she’d never unpacked, she picked up with ease and left me. Now I have to reorganize all I took out. I tried shoving and folding and bagging, the only thing that works is throwing out items that don't belong. I thought was moving in but I was just a vacation to her.

She was a genius yet could not able to comprehend how I could feel unattractive to her. She engineered literal solid metal from basically nothing as part of her job and couldn’t comprehend how this was possible. And if that means she gave every she had to give to me then we were never meant it be. We were each other’s prized ponies, she would show me off and I was wag my ******* tail and prance just like I was supposed to. Though I wanted to feel like a wild horse, free yet at total ease I was in the right place.
No amount of intelligence makes up for our issues. I miss her. Or at least the idea of her. How she danced so beautifully. How she could put together puzzles with such ease. Her music massaged my back and scratched my brain. She was beautiful on the inside and out. I ******* hate football and yet I practically had Go Blue! tattooed on my arm. She loved bismuth. She was cautious and careful. I wish she loved me like I loved her. Like I love her still. I see her and hear her and think of her oh so often.
I have never said I love you with so much fluff, I was going every direction with it because she didn’t feel the same way. I offered up everything I had to offer. I unpacked everything and in return she zipped up her bags and slammed the door shut behind her.
She had this way about her you just don’t get often, so I saved her for a rainy day, in a dessert of physical affection.

“I enjoy our time but it feels temporary and conditional, I want you but I don’t need you. I will keep pushing you away. We are quite different so it isn’t that hard to think you’d agree.” are the words I cannot bring myself to say.

My hip bones no longer ache for him. I am sinking into the feeling of accepting myself and where I’m at, but I didn’t think to check for passengers on deck. I am a boat and the shore is never where I was meant to be.

i wanted so badly to make a cake
bought the ingredients
preheated the oven
sifted the flour
weighed the ingredients, separated the dry from the wet
mixed everything together
i put it in the oven and waited
i had a toothpick to check for doneness
and it still came out overdone
do i try again
what if i want cookies now
what if they don't want cake

lucifer came back into my life
dragged me down to hell
there were no flames or chains
but actions, immoral and careless
he tempted me with the mere prospect of physical affection
but only behind closed doors and lies
i was the other woman
the scorned, naive girl who loved a boy who would never love her back
he took a twenty-one year girl back to being her twelve year old self who hadn’t been kissed
thought i moved on, matured, was happy
but he came, made me doubt everything and wrecked up so much of my life
and then he left saying he loved her and hoped i'd understood
and that’s when i knew he would never love me

there is a lot of film and tv with dances where the main character is devastated by the slow dance, but ends up with the right person, or perhaps they gets pulled onto the floor and everything is right, the music, the stars
i forgot life was neither and when the lights dimmed at prom as a slow song came on i was forming blisters as the person who would later threaten to slit his wrists for breaking up with him was nowhere to be seen
the nail in the coffin of that night as i gazed at him with her and wondered why he’d even asked me to a dance he mostly ignored me at
i was surrounded by people, young and in love as the song dragged on, much like the night would with him
swallowed up by his tongue and his hands

when he was good it was okay and when it was bad it was terrible
every time i asked for below the minimum he would argue i didn’t tell him how much it meant to me, to be asked out in person, to be asked to prom like everyone else (even if it was blatantly obvious and embarrassing)

people cheered for me when we started dating
they would never know about the night he threatened to **** himself
how he cornered me for information after i drunkenly said i wasn’t totally clean after we’d broken up
how i cried after that interrogation and was so close to jumping off the deck, wishing i was dead
how it felt to be a truly evil person for no reasons other than the bitter complaints he spit out of his mouth
they wouldn’t see me break down when asked if i was okay
they wouldn’t know how i stared at the ceiling of that cabin as tears ran down my eyes, too tired to sob anymore
how i fell asleep after the exhaustion took over

they didn’t know how bad it would get
and neither did i

sometimes people know exactly how to respond
they know when physical touch to comfort someone is appropriate and necessary
when to pull away, when to stay silent
when to speak up
but i swear it's as if i'm always looking through a slightly frosted glass while there is noise in the background
i can see and hear what is in front me though there is a delay and misunderstandings
and they say think before you speak, but my brain didn't get the entire memo in development because my brain was rapidly firing the next thing to do or say or see or smell or try
it doesn't mean what i say or do should be excused, corrected, or reprimanded
it just means i need grace and time
and if that isn't possible some patience is appreciated
because i'm capable of simultaneously being too much and not enough
i don't want to be different but i'm told to try to be normal can be a bit dull and i should shine
because no one ever describes me as boring
and sometimes i really wish they did

in middle school i had a father
a great, loving father
and by high school i didn’t

at thirteen i thought i was an emotionless person
a cold, calm, and happy person
and by nineteen i’d realized i was anything but

at thirteen i liked a boy and I wrote that in permanent marker on a desk and would never say anything
i covered it with tape, but it is still there
and at twenty-two he moved back... it didn’t work out

in elementary i said i loved a boy and never got a reply
it didn’t stop me from saying those things to more boys, and eventually girls and people who don't identify as either

and now i hold on to the hope maybe each heartbreak will be different from before

one thing i know won’t be the same is at twelve i had a dad
and now i don’t

i scrutinize the issues i have since losing a father
if a boy might hurt me he tried to make sure they didn’t
now i put myself out there and get hurt
i look for him in every person i romanticize
i compare each person to a father who exceeded all expectations then started to die right in front of me