the still-broken pieces

• beach season is upon us; I can think of nothing else more terrifying 

you’re not mine to lose (oh, God I’m going under)

my heart is so sick

this is the least hatred I’ve ever felt for my own skin. and still, there is the whispering. 

hide and seek

I won’t always be nineteen and silently praying you won’t say anything when I lay my head down on your shoulder at the drive-in movie. there is something fragile here, a thin thread spun from my hands to your chest and even if you whispered, we could not withstand it. I am rooted in the spot next to you, half in awe of your eyelashes in the dim light and half in fear of being the reason this falls through. do you remember running away for the first time? flipping through state lines like they were the pages of an old book so well loved they fell apart when you touched them. and you fell asleep in my bed in the hotel we found outside the city and I did not know it then but, that was the beginning. I’ve never been good at being tied to anything but you were my home-free, my safe place to return to when my fickle soul got lonely. falling asleep on something unspoken, falling somewhere between ‘i don’t know you’ and ‘every single piece’ and waking up just to watch you leave. it takes a lot of long-distances and shattered glass to create patterns like these. and maybe it’s wrong to hold on to something so transparent. all I really know is when the credits started rolling, it was my head on your shoulder and your palm on my knee and the closest our jagged edges had ever been to safety. 

heaven forbid you care about anything

the thud of your pen hitting the floor screams anger; the sound of my cold voice masks fear. I cannot stand watching other living souls fly out of control. you shake all my faultlines and sigh, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

then what does? 

keeping your own head underwater takes precedence over the answer key clasped between your teeth. this righteous anger comes from watching someone who knew better. and I won’t let you an inch closer, I couldn’t take your hooks moving further in. (why didn’t someone tell it would be like this.) 

“would your life be be better without them?” 
“yes, yes, yes.”
“but would theirs?”
“no..”
“greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

and I am caught in between. if I laid down my life, you would take it from me. you should not have told me about the dark nights you spent across the ocean. those shadows may have lightened but I can’t trust someone who’d go to any length. I run at the first sign of fixation.

hand written notes in the morning can’t change the black nights that came before them. 

what are we here for