Calm
It starts like this: She’s sitting across from you, and you’re watching her as you
may never see her again. You study her every detail in hopes of burning the
shape of her lips and the curve of her face into your memory. But you know
that the minute that you look away, she will become a blurred outline of the
girl that you remembered. It’s like you spent so much time painting the perfect
picture of her, and the moment you step away, you plunge the canvas
underwater. The paint rises, then falls apart. She’s no longer perfect, and who
were you kidding? You never were an artist, but as I said, it starts like this:
You’re sitting across from her and she’s sitting across from you. You can’t help
thinking that she could be the next Picasso, but she would never pick up a
brush or attempt to mold clay into the edge of your jaw or the slope of your
nose. You both know that memories will fade and the paint will peel, but she’ll
forever be a mess of reds and yellows smeared across a blank wall in your
mind. But take a breath, because it ends like this: You will look down at your
hands, and they will be smeared with the colors that she was, and she’ll stand
up with clean hands, and walk away from you. You’ll forever make her a
glorified masterpiece, while you’re still a blank sheet of paper with no
potential or desire to be filled. And it isn’t your fault that you have no idea
how to hold a brush; some things just are, and with her, you are not.
Resent
Ironically, she loved the voices in her head. Because she has this fixation on
death, this fixation on change, this fixation on three years she grew out of pain.
This fixation on sleep. This fixation on you and on her, but who could she be?
She spent three years writing poems about a fixation on the past, and you told
her it was worth it because he told her it would last. But darling, she will hold
her tongue as she holds you tight, because forgetting what you think love
means is her sleeping pill every night. She remembers when he woke up and
screamed, “Maybe our love is just laced with better things because darling, I’m
happy with life and you’re just happy with me.” And as she tried her best to
read between the lines, his lips shaped words she tries to interpret as lies,
only to see the devil behind deep inside the details. As Lucifer found his way
back into retail, he sold us a product they did not want to buy, But they were
not trying to be original, they were just trying to survive. The voices in her
brain telling her it is all in her head. She will sleep with one eye open but she
won’t sleep until she’s dead. Because a fair assessment of an existence is an
inconsistent realist vision of selfish antics reduced to the survival of the fittest,
defined by their ability to avoid those carrying any sickness. And these
whispers in her head intensify to raspy screams asking when her skull will
explode so they can breathe. They know that no one has a voice when no one
is listening and the violent riot of staying silent or quiet is torturous to those
who need to hear something, and that violence has its own sort of beauty. And
he was her beauty. And her violent smile. And she was his violent prayer. And
she was not his oxygen, but he would still breathe her air. Because these
voices in her brain reminded her of past mistakes, the beauty she found of
being able to say, “Look what I went through, I survived.” But is survival living,
or is survival just a placeholder for a vacant mind to cut off the threat to
coincide with the soil while their blood boils?
Melancholy
It’s 6 pm. She’s on her way back, another long car ride. Thoughts are running
loose and she forgets them all. It’s a strange kind of a mess. The kind that
leaves an emptiness in you, that nothing can fill. She misses you. She always
misses you and thinks she always will. It’s been three days where she hasn’t
seen you. You’re flowing through her veins, reminding her aching bones that
you’re not there. You make everything lighter and you make sure that the
strange feeling in her stomach dissolves. She didn’t notice how much space
you already took in her body and she had to take a distance. She had to remind
herself that she’s not defined by you. She is still her and before you, she could
also live. When she doesn’t know what to do she just keeps it to herself. Maybe
she will keep doing this, being too attached and then being too distant. It’s just
her who’s searching her limits, how far she can swim in their sea of emotions
without drowning. She doesn’t want to depend and she will never beg. No one
ever understood her phases, she thinks no one ever will. But you don’t care;
you stick to her, as always. She’s never doubted you or your loyalty and that’s
the most precious kind of trust. She’s sorry that she’s sometimes so occupied
with her own thoughts. But she’ll always be here; she’ll always love you.
Weary
I think you can split heartbreak into two categories. So first, you have
nighttime heartbreak, right? You know, mascara stains on your pillow from
where you pressed your face so hard to muffle the sound of the sobs racking
your body and shaking the bones of your ribs. It’s the kind where your tears
are falling so fast you need to gasp for air but then inhaling seems to hurt
without them. It’s you staring out of your window at 2:43 am at the full moon
and wondering aloud what you did wrong. It’s you still up, still staring out of
your window, at 5:57 am and watching a combination of reds and oranges
bleed into the skyline and the tears are falling again because you used to
believe that the sun would always rise and set without them but now they’re
gone. But I think you’ve also got daytime heartbreak. That’s when you think
you’re over them and a song comes on the radio and you’re singing along and
typing a new message to them to tell them about this new song you like before
you remember that they don’t care anymore. It’s when you drive past their
favorite cafe and it hits you that you’ll never look over into the passenger seat
and see them watching the world flash by with a sort of childish amazement.
It’s when you have to shake off the familiar stabs in your chest because the
light has turned to green and the car behind you is beeping because they don’t
realize that the stitches you spent countless nights working so hard on have
just been torn ever so slightly. It’s where every flash of brown hair and every
pair of green eyes makes you stop and another stitch rip. I wish I could tell you
which one was worse, but both leave you on the floor in a pool of your own
tears and your hands in tatters from attempting to repair the holes in your
heart which now has edges as sharp as ice.