So often we hear stories about love. It is a word that slips easily off the tongue as if it is made of only the finest silk. It has become a mumbled concept that we poke fun at, the joke someone tiredly decided to crack at a birthday party because everyone has already memorized the punchline. Love, the deepest of all popular clichés, sits prominently upon pedestals within the stanzas of sappy high school poetry and in the elderly eyes of companions that have spent decades of their lives blooming in adoration. Love, the only child of fear and fearlessness, is the friend you invite to the party out of pity because your mother told you to. Yes, we are all drastically different people; from ethnicity to personality, and language to beliefs. Diversity is potent, harboring oceans of colorful ideas that define the nature of beauty itself. It keeps the human race buzzing with truth, extremely vital to the development of who we are all becoming. And just like ourselves, there exists many different kinds of love. Loving ourselves. Our families. Our friends. Our passions. Another person whose existence gives life itself infinite value. Each other. As people, we cannot be defined by labels. We cannot be packaged and wrapped into pretty little categories of where we fit solely based on the events of our pasts. We cannot only exist interpreted by where we have been and what we have seen. We are not just where we truly feel the most at home or what we choose to fill the empty space where the puzzle piece we have spent years searching for belongs. In fact, we are not just anything. You cannot define your worth by the way you sign your name, because when all is said and done, the only thing that is visible is the curvy loops in the way you penned the first letter with only ink and paper. No skin. No bone. No fight. No dream. The roads you have traveled to get to today’s destination do not matter as much as you think they should. A recovering alcoholic. The girl who survived an arduous battle with cancer. The teenage guy whose future feels impossible to decipher. A middle aged man who quit his job in order to seek true happiness. These are just fragments, broken glass pieces of who we are. Only a cropped, blurry photograph. Never the full picture. Love allows us to zoom out. Love permits us a chance to view the bigger picture, to expand our hearts in order to make sense of not only ourselves, but the chaos that has surrounded us for as long as we have been conscious enough to remember it. What does a sixteen year old girl of an uneventful town have to say about love that is so important or even worth the time of day to listen to? The answer, like ourselves, cannot be answered so simply. It sounds silly, unheard of, for a young woman of such a tender age to believe that she has the wisdom to understand the many facets of the foundations of love. However, there is so much electricity she has stored from the hands of time, the gifts of observation, and priceless experience to bleed out into words so that the people who told her she was too young to possibly understand a fraction of its meaning will realize that she did. She does. Or at least, she is beginning to. This one is for you. Perhaps you have been taught to treat love like a swear word, the estranged family member that disappeared from your household Christmas card collection. Perhaps you are trembling to experience it for yourself, rather than hearing what it must be like to hold the hand of a silhouette that does not desire only to let go. Perhaps you have spent years believing that love is only a feeling. Only positive. Only fluttery. Only romantic. It is not always such. It is a force that, much like a Category 5 hurricane, cannot be reckoned with. But “cannot” hardly ever resonates with “should not,” and so I beg you, that when the winds disturb the shutters, sometimes it is beneficial to keep the window open. Let love envelope you. Let it love you. Whether you like it or not, you are the home that will not crumble in the gentlest of breezes or the most treacherous of gusts. You are strong enough for love because that is what you are made of. Not just blood or tears or cheek-to-cheek grins. You are made of love. This package of love is the only category we should cease to be afraid of. Love, of all forms, is who we are.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not always a happy person. I am not made of summer sunshine and daffodils and constantly feeling limitless. I am not a cartoon character on the screen of a static television that can only ever showcase one emotion, laughing away humble hours and only ever blushing out of joy. There are days when my skin is the last place I want to live in, my heartbeat just like an overplayed song on the radio. There are days that I burn, when staying buried under my sheets feels infinitely more worth it than getting out at all. Days when I let my fear of failure grab me by the throat with no intention of letting go, ones I wish would end before they even have the chance to begin.
I am human. Real. I make mistakes that stretch like wildfire and burn everything comfortable to me. I am a victim of comparison, of self-inflicted hurt, of seemingly endless defeat. There were eras where I measured my importance on the size of my waist, the amount of attention received from others, by false love. I once thought that I could find acceptance in what others had to say about my existence, that I would only find joy in being fearless.
Math scares me. Finding spiders in my sink terrifies me. Public speaking tosses my stomach like ***** laundry. My fear of abandonment holds me hostage, prevents me from tasting vulnerability. I am even afraid of myself on the days it is hard to keep inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. I am very much afraid. I am alive because of it.
Fear is captivating, not always negatively. It allows us to understand what really matters based on a collection of what we are afraid of losing.
And yes, the same life I was eager to lose back a few forevers ago has morphed into one I never want to lose. I love this. I am loved, and I am holding on tight to the carousel of reality. I will hold my breath even if I fear running out of air, because I'd rather be breathless and experienced than falsely believe that there are no more horizons left to reach.

I.
It is so simple.
Tuesday atmosphere bleeding
autumn rain down windowpanes,
the descent of fragile hopes
and hands intertwined a little
too tight for wondering.


II.
We are here; hazy within
the iridescent walls of my childhood home.
We slow dance to the fading refrigerator light,
our laughter reverberating down the stairs
I fell down when I was in kindergarten
and afraid of boys with loud voices.


III.
It is more complicated than they think.
We scour home decor magazines,
pointing at flattened apartment windows
overlooking the bustle of city chaos.
A young couple walks across the page
and into a dusk-painted room,
faces exuberant in the sunlight
of their newborn lives.
One day, we will be just like them, you tell me.
I almost forget that I have yet to turn
seventeen.


IV.
In my head, there is nothing wrong
with designing the future,
sketching myself into false realities
where I feel safe falling asleep
in someone else’s arms.
I have written myself within the spaces
of unpromised decades,
and I paint your hands, the ridges--
the crevices in which I have placed
an abundance of gemstone promises
that do not shatter in the light of something real.



V.
We are young
but I love you.
To the rest of the world, we are teenagers
clutching each other’s spines in grass fields
when we cannot even comprehend
what we are praying for.
Hold me.
I love you.
I cannot promise this enough.

my stomach sinks to my feet
whenever i think about you leaving me
and my mind is occupied
with the same haunting thoughts
of needing you to stay

i think of you as a thunderstorm
but i'd rather drown in your rage
than be forced to live without it

our fragile hearts are tied together
with a string of pinky promises
and when you finally leave me,
the best part of me will leave too

in past lives,
my heart was a corn maze with no end
and I wandered aimlessly
searching for answers and explanations
to questions I did not know existed

I viewed life through a kaleidoscope
of blurred colors and fine lines
that could never be crossed,
fixated at stars whenever I kept my head up
for a little longer than necessary
in order to catch a glimpse
of hopes falling faster than my eyelids could
drop to tango,
at the end of a dizzying afternoon

love exists in the crevices of his lips
when they meet mine, fluttering
with promises and words powerful
enough to knock me down effortlessly

it thrives when we're sitting on the couch,
Christmas tree lights like dazzling fragments of heaven
reflecting in his familiar eyes,
and it blossoms when we walk together
in the autumn wind, the sighing
breeze echoing like wildfire in our
ears, whispering both elation
and disbelief

that I am even here right now,
after sixteen years of mystery,
a collection of dust-covered insecurity
now an open book beckoning to be read

yet here we are, and
he holds my hand like a crystal glass
he is afraid to drop, and
I cannot stop thanking him
over and over again,
a fragile metronome of gratitude-
for willing to be brave enough to read
my very first page.

i am not a metaphor
for the cracked sidewalk
that sprawls outside my door
growing unwanted weeds,
littered with faults and things
people don't want anymore

i am nothing like the sidewalk
my heart is not made of cement
and it is not used to being walked on
yes, i have faults, but i was not made
to be stepped on repeatedly
because i am human, not asphalt
and my heart is often stuck in my throat,
not steady enough for your heavy words-
not built for your harsh footsteps

i am not a metaphor
for the card games that are played
in rundown casinos
filled with bustling people
with foreheads gleaming sweat,
the sole ambition to conquer the first prize-
people just like you

i am nothing like the card games
and i can't keep pretending that
nothing bothers me, with
a permanent poker face
and always settling to be the sore loser
because i've spent too many forevers
hidden under your shadow,
and it's about time that i pulled a joker
because i am tired of always letting you win

I often daydream of the places my feet will graze, eyes still bright and hopes lifted boldly above my head in a handful of future years when I will finally understand who I am. Oftentimes, I envision myself gazing through the frigid glass of my apartment window overlooking an entire city of hungry souls. Paired with a glass of pink champagne, I will study the intricate patterns in the way they carry themselves from one place to another, an entire kingdom of strangers dressed in pale blues and yellows and tans.

Who are they? What are they searching for?

I stand—a figure in a sheer black dress miles above, pondering upon the sea of incomprehensible gray swarming a thousand forevers below my feet. There exists a starving fear, one that reminds me that if my heels happen to break through the balcony, I will become one of them.
I dream of you returning home to me after an abstract day of trial and error. Even after the musky dust of today’s freedom collects upon your shoulders, you still smell the same familiar way you did when you were seventeen and unsure, wondering if I will be around to love you next year or tomorrow or only this afternoon.

Below us, they continue to travel, approaching midnight with a cautious volume that grows more and more lost as the hours waltz by. Some are hunting for a friendship that slipped like soap bubbles through the valleys between their fingers. The youthful delicacy of unrequited love. Some search for the art of escaping from a life that shattered their bones numb. Others, for salvation. A reason to permit their hearts to keep beating.

We are no longer wandering; instead, fingers intertwined at the success of a future that would not have obeyed the stars if we had not been like them before, pursuing dreams like pixie dust before they had the chance to grow up and become a little too impossible.

You kiss my forehead goodnight, drawing curtains and racing hearts. For once, I sleep. There is nothing left to search for.

Even the sturdiest trees in my backyard quiver like mad in the breath of a strong breeze. I am like them, as I panic over the thought of watching you brush effortlessly past my shoulders, the way hurricane wind has the power to sweep a grown man off his feet. I am cautious, tiptoeing around the idea of your absence like fallen power lines in the rain, trembling as I carry the precious moments I have spent with you in the safety of my own coat pockets so they will never feel the agony of electrocution. I am electrified, as I seek shelter from the storm within the comforting warmth of your arms. There are places where the sun flutters her fiery eyelids against waves that kiss shorelines like familiar relatives. There are places where park benches call us by name and ones that long day and night for our feet to grace their unexplored streets. There are words that hang in the atmosphere like hot air balloons waiting to carry us to newborn horizons. It is strange, how there are places where the skies do not bleed threats or cry in languages we cannot understand. How I know that we are metal statues standing embraced in a field during a lightning storm, and yet I would rather get struck with the energy of a thousand prayers if it meant that I could stay, frozen in time, for an eternity we are not guaranteed.

After comfort settles in, you wonder if the giddy anticipation has already packed its suitcase and whether it has already considered embarking on the next flight home. Today, your hair is pulled back in a soft tousled ponytail and the two hours you spent getting ready for your first real date has since waned into a rushed ten minutes, bobby pins resting at the corner of your lips. No longer do you wait on the staircase, eyes cast through the dusty window at the curve of your street for his car. Instead, you hear the electricity of his footsteps come humming up your front step, reverberating memorized and familiar, a sound that still makes the edges of your heart rise upwards like something you mumble in your sleep. It is today you decide that this is normal. His socks on the floor, his shoes kicked off and remaining tied tightly at your front doormat. He smiles and it looks exactly like last September, like uncomfortable summer, melting like birthday candles and falling in love with a stranger all over again.
You know him now, his hands, little—but firm. Those eyes shining in the humid July, and you swear that if someone asked you to choose their color from a palette, you could find it in a heartbeat, with a nonchalant point of a finger. Yet there will always be something about him, something new and as fresh as a ripe apple falling from the highest branch, bright burning red that you catch with your bare hands before it has the chance to hit the ground.
And your love, though you have learned it by heart, is the apple, scarlet and dewy, that you keep your eyes gazing up at even after you have memorized the physics of its fall. His arms are a fire you have warmed yourself by long enough to feel safe forever. But you are both ruthless and young, burning in dangerous shades of potential eternities.

You have fallen, but you are still falling. Love has a knack for catching the hopeless.

You have since forgotten the stale aroma of old books, how they once stretched your afternoons into nights that ended in the final flutters of heavy eyelids and young hearts beating with flustered adrenaline.
An eternity has separated your fingertips from the edges of creased paper memories that have since faded into faint flickers of yesterdays, wilted and tarnished like the handles of childhood bicycles left out in the rain.

The thrill of disappearing into the spines of stories where your name could be whisked away into the summer wind and forgotten, every mistake ever committed melting within the spaces of all of the words you were once too afraid to write yourself.

Chasing thrills was only ever appropriate for the innocent.

And you remember being young—living without thinking twice about the hands of the clock and their lonely waltz, never worrying about crossing off monotonous boxes on the calendar and or where tomorrow would begin. Instead, you’d just wake, wiping away the hazy violet sleep from your eyes, your little fingers sounding out the words existing upon unfamiliar pages you were still too small to understand.

But now you do. You are full of understanding. The way time slips through bigger hands that have grown strong and calloused with the weight of your own troubles, how you have learned that trying to catch it after the fall is equivalent to waiting for yesterdays to come knocking at your front porch. The way days never return home, never send you letters, never call first.

Comfort sleeps in the knowledge of temporary. Time is fleeting. Perhaps love is too, but you are still too soft to know this yet. Still too eager to be left out in the rain.

And when you finally curl up with a stack of paperback nostalgia, you are greeted with neglected lives and heroes that exist far beyond the ones you have broken yourself to be saved by.

*You  have been busy chasing thrills this entire time.
You have only ever been innocent.

The first steps you take as you enter the immaculate hallways of the first cathedral in Rome are the last ones taken out of fear.

Fear, you had always been full of it, of potential abandonment and quivering voices.

But here, the arches have beckoned years upon years of marveling, of eyes cast upward at staggering golden ceilings, light reflecting through the brilliance of violet stained glass.

This is the moment in which you realize that bravery exists in the aftermath. Just hours ago, you had boarded the suffocating plane all by yourself, red sneakers and matching suitcase, departing the same home that kept you calm for so long. With shaking hands and a hammering heart, you are buzzing with static electricity you were too afraid to understand before this moment.

Peeking out of the claustrophobic airplane window, you realize just how small you are, how microscopic everything seems just as soon as it has been defeated. And though your worries have taken shelter as a lump in your throat, they soon dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea.

There is nothing left but tranquility.

Cascading blankets of translucent white hang daintily through the glass, blinding the plummeting ground from existence. This is the first time you have ever let yourself taste freedom.

And then, while your neck cranes down at the indigo expanse below you, you realize that the same blue is no longer taking shelter inside of your bones. Blue no longer runs through the paths of veins in your hands or in the moments in class you wished you would have said something but never did. Blue no longer remembers your writing and how easy it was to fit solitude in between the letters.

Blue, instead, is all around you, oceans below your feet like a collection of everything you were too heavy to hold onto.

Somewhere, miles and hours behind you, your mother is cooking dinner. She will leave an extra bowl of Monday night soup at your place at the dinner table, an accidental broth you will never taste. Your father’s heavy eyelids have collapsed, television humming white noise, cat on his shoulder as the peach-colored dusk melts into the room.

Yet you were there,

suspended miles of infinities above the same ocean you fell in love with back when you were even smaller than before. Back when your big brown eyes followed paths in the heavens, the soft glide of the ones brave enough to shuttle toward new horizons, redefining the notion of reckless abandon.

And now, you are here.

You are one of them.

Captivated, enveloped in the shadows of the masterpieces that have aged over thousands of lives that will never meet yours. You are a pioneer of your first real experience, marble statues and pillars the sole witnesses of your rebirth.

They are haunting, breathtaking, faces painted gracefully upon crumbling walls in colors that once made souls tremble in the same skies you had dreamed of, and then dreamed in.

You are here, surrounded by memories of light. And for a couple of moments tied together by blind hope, you forget that darkness once knew you by name.

I wonder what my life would be like if I could feel constant in-betweens.
Not scarlet or neon orange, but instead,
a warm, friendly wall of peach or something grey and familiar.
You always seemed to climb through my skin from the inside out,
clawing at reminders hanging from my limbs
to stop taking everything so seriously.

On hard days, I do not cry.

Thanks to you,
I spew lava from my eyes until it feels
as if my tears could burn entire highways
down the slopes of my cheeks,
my anger the epitome of a pyromaniac's paradise.

When I am afraid, I do not tremble.

Instead, I am a nine on the Richter scale,
a category-five hurricane of fear
that cannot be shaken away.

And like lightning striking the top of an oak tree,
the next moment I am filled with so much joy
that my heart begins to burst
into four-thousand yellow balloons
and learns how to fly away,
performing a salsa with the hummingbirds
and a waltz with the rays of sunlight
emerging from inside of me.

Never have I felt the calmness of the lake.

Instead, I harbor oceans within the crevices of my palms,
scraping out entire planets from the pupils of those
who have spent their entire lives feeling too little.

And thanks to you,
I wonder how my life would be
if I had been blessed with the capability to feel
just okay
just fine
just something other than
out-of-control.


But my heart keeps pumping
in tsunami waves rather than puddles,
and when I finally stumble upon peace,
it consumes me.

i distinctly remember
your admirable smile
and the serene look on your face
blushing in the warm summer air
and how that smile
seemed to embarrass the stars
and the overall brightness of it
humiliated the city lights.

i distinctly remember
the sound of your laughter
euphonic and melodious
ringing like joyous church bells
and how that laugh
put all symphonies to shame
and the overall resonance of it
mortified the musicality of this world.

i distinctly remember
your face in the midst of a crowd
staring back at me, a ghost
with a gaunt, pitiable look
and how that face
seemed as despairing as the ocean
and how the overall sight of it
stirred jealousy in the oppressive rainclouds

I miss the days when I would find poetry resting peacefully on the kitchen counter, hiding skillfully between the cracks of the tile bathroom floor. Back then, it shuttled out from the tips of my fingers like golden lightning that kept my heart pulsing, my eyelids propped open wide with all of the secrets I had been struck with.  

There were nights I found it in the soft flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek, the glowing warmth of his hand that held mine like something he would never grow tired of carrying, even though that was where I kept all of the words that had been stolen from my lips since the first moment I knew that I loved him.

But back then, they were everywhere-- the words-- nestling in high nests perched upon branches I was always tall enough to reach, settling in the pockets of worn denim overalls and the creases of watercolor smiles I had secretly painted on strangers with no names to match the dim light of their faces.

There was a time. There is a time.

Now, I sit at my desk with trembling hands and words stuck jumbled and uncharted in the aftermath of the past. And poetry no longer spills from the cracks of the baby pink teapot, no longer falls with every tear that still remembers how to emulate the rain.

But it is here when I am with him, his arms becoming the paper I have spilled my soul onto back before I memorized the melody of his heartbeat. In the sound of our voices filling all of the vacant spaces that used to haunt my bones, in the hushed music that plays every time my name drips like honey from the edges of his laughter.

There is a time. It is now. Poetry was once written, now it is living.

You are fifteen the first time someone says your name like it is made of electricity. He is made of sunlight, the kind that you wake up feeling on your skin and the kind of voice you still hear ringing like your favorite song in your head even after you hang up the phone.
You love him simply because he is real.
When you talk to him, you no longer feel compelled to think with your brain. Rather, it is the monotonous thump within the cavern walls of your chest that does the thinking for you.
When he says your name like a contagion he is desperate to catch, it skips. The spaces between the beats become less and less defines, both snare drum hearts pounding in unison for each other. Nothing else exists except for him and those hypnotic eyes, like footprints he leaves behind on the surface of your soul.
Your lips meet under the luminescence of the Big Dipper above, beneath the radiance of the same stars you used to curse before you met him. You recall the moment you had given up at the irrational idea of love, shaking your fists at God, screaming questions that only time could possibly answer. The days when the only thing reverberating against your lips was a collection of absence and everything left unsaid. But those days are over, and now he looks at you- gazes into your eyes like had found what he had spent seventeen years unknowingly searching for.
You can't help a smile from blossoming across your face because your heart, though it thinks, over analyzes, now it understands. He is your serendipity, a piece of heaven revealed to you at the least expected time. When all you wanted to do was destroy your fragile skin with the remnants of what could have been, he became your guardian angel. One that pulled you from the wrath and toil of your deepest afflictions and whispered, “You are safe. You are home.”

This morning I was born, pink as a sunrise waiting patiently to melt into infinity.
I turned five in the afternoon, small hands tracing entire universes in the frost of a school bus window, wide eyes peeking out into a frigid February dream I have long since forgotten.
As dusk began to stretch its fragile skeleton along the walls, I was suddenly thirteen and searching for any trace of a ghost screaming relentlessly inside skin I could not recognize. Broken mirrors and madness tasted all too familiar as the sky began to blacken like something rotten kept secret for a little too long. Patience, young one. Minute hands will soon teach you how to taste sweetness all over again.
Faint stars collected far above my head, and all of a sudden I was one week away from seventeen. I knew that if I slept, she would greet me, after a day of sixteen beautiful stories waiting to be told.
A swaddled baby. A toddler scribbling backwards letters on blank pages buzzing in anticipation. An imperfect perfectionist, a paradox in process. A wanderer searching for fragments of salvation on an earth too broken for redemption. A rescued victim of her own absent self. A soul that has stretched its edges to form the revival of a buried smile. A renaissance blooming with every fleeting moment.

I have been all of these things. The thump in my chest understands this. Time paints with a hand that never tires of healing, never grows old, never loses hope.
In the morning I will rise, pink as a sunrise with blazing eyes that can already see the dance of infinity.

When the air around us becomes still, I begin the hunt for guarantees. Perhaps they are hiding, terrified, within the glimmer of promise that always seems to catch me moments before the fall. Maybe they are written somewhere inconspicuously, in the spaces between the fingers that hold me together better than gravity ever did. Savor this, I repeat to myself, a broken record that only remembers how to play the same tune over and over, over and over; but for some reason, I keep it running. Savor this. Savor this. Savor this. But when your lips greet the apples of my cheeks with a fire that cannot be extinguished, time is all that crosses my mind.
You whisper the volumes of reasons why you love me and I am only thinking of the moment you will tire of it. You shelter my joy in a canopy of trust, but I am far too busy counting seconds until the minute I become just another pretty story for you to tell when I have been set aside to collect dust.
I have discovered art in the curvature of your temples and the way you shook my father's hand with honor that night you kissed me under the illuminated blanket of God's great masterpiece. I have discovered it in the way you hold me close on the days I feel light years away from myself, the days when my body feels more like an abandoned orphanage than something that is meant to be alive.
You promise me forevers decorated in contentment and I am waiting for the day you regret it.
We are youthful and electrified, juggling candles at the tips of our fingertips and expecting not to burn.
I tell you that I want a yellow house with light blue shutters and a swing on our porch that rocks gently in the breezes of April.  I tell you that I have visions of us warming our feet by the fireplace in December snowfall, consuming peace within the melodious laughter of the children we will have. I tell you that when it storms, we will build forts out of quilts and hold competitions of brightness between the lightning and the glow of our own love.
I almost tell you that I need this, but I only find fear in my disappointment when I realize that there are no guarantees, and until tomorrow comes, we are holding our breath in limbo.
Instead, I tell you that I love you presently, and while we slow dance in our backyard a thousand eternities away, I am losing track of days spent grieving a dream that has not yet, or never will, come true.

Write it all down. The way you feel when you wake up on a rainy Saturday morning, the howling thunder of a summer storm, how your heart races like hurricane winds at the simple thought of tomorrow. Write about your best friend's laugh at three in the morning and how blissful it is to have found a hand that squeezes yours back. Write when you feel as if your soul is perched at the very top of a mountain, and when it sinks to the deepest part of your mind's treacherous oceans. Write when your heart is dancing like a ballerina spinning in a white tutu. Write when it is still. Quiet. Lost. Write when you've fallen in love, when you've lost at a cruel game, when you fall asleep wanting to erase every memory you've ever experienced, like the songs you cried to when you were thirteen and swore you were falling apart. Write it all down, the bright colors that melt into fond afternoons, the bittersweet tastes, the textures that scar, the aches and pains. Write when words can no longer express what exists inside of you. Do it anyway. That is what love is.

I remember everything— each space on the calendar crossed out in permanent marker but never forgotten.

I remember every before and after, every minute that has passed by my irises with the impatience of speeding cars on the interstate. I keep my hands permanently cupped so that memories cannot slip through the cracks in my fingers, tea spilling from my grandmother's cracked porcelain. Every heartbeat that has silently taken refuge under the rug, every breath I spent wondering what it would be like if I peeked out and saw the soles of the feet that have replaced the metronome of my steps.

I am building a life out of the sound of my own laughter echoing down walls painted by the artist of morning light. My heart is a kaleidoscope house with mirrors I peer into and find older versions of myself, silhouettes of smaller dreamers with eyes that could ignite the world with the gentle flutter of a blink.

I am dressed up as Tinkerbell for my first birthday, fairy green and sparkling. Pictures are taken, kisses on pink cheeks and soft feet. Growing up is not an option. Blink. I am 5 years old and missing my front teeth, crying lava on the bus ride to school as my mother’s familiar face shrinks through the frosted window. No matter how hard I squint, she is still just a dot on the sidewalk waiting for me to come home. Blink. I am eight years old and playing with Barbie dolls on my bedroom carpet, crayons scattered all over my bed and my imagination sprinting across the baby pink walls faster than I can keep up with it. Blink. Thirteen hurts a lot more than scraping knees on uneven sidewalks. My own tears begin to taste like the beginnings of a broken heart. Blink. Blink. Blink.

I am sixteen and in love. The kind that holds my breath hostage in its arms, the kind that knows my name like the lyric of a song memorized in past lives. My hopes remain suspended twenty thousand feet in the air, fearless and spontaneous. There are flowers growing wildly in the way that I love him, in the way I see myself waiting for a thousand years to have this forever. The taste of happiness has finally made its way into my morning coffee.

And as much as they wanted me to live in Neverland forever, I have finally found the door to where my heart lives. Every moment is a volume. Every day is a masterpiece hung intentionally on the wall for the world to see, for my own hungry eyes to catch a glimpse of now.

Blink. It is time.

Though my hand remains intertwined with yours as we lie perfectly like plastic figurines in the middle of an empty nowhere, I am wondering where you are. You are not here, not really-- and by the memorized angle of your brow as it focuses up at the hypnotic veil of heaven enveloping our fragile bodies, I can sense that you have drifted gently, somewhere far away. Perhaps you have already built a comfortable cottage for us within the tiniest crater of the moon, our own little claustrophobic wonderland without envy or indifference. Or perhaps you are sitting upon the most pristine carousel horse at a London carnival with a woman who does not share my name, or my face, or my essence. Maybe, as the song plays its lighthearted melody and the lights create a memory of iridescent dizziness, you find yourself trying to search for fragments of me in her. I am nowhere to be found in the smoothness of her puckered lips or the salsa of her fluttering eyelashes, batting away the only expired yesterdays I exist in. Maybe you have ventured off into the limitless abyss of outer space and have discovered the loveliness of a parallel universe where we do end up together. A place where I am the beautiful woman on the carousel, buried forever in the familiarity of your childish laughter that resonates like rainfall. I have built myself an entire kingdom somewhere within the muddled walls of the heart I taught myself how to adore. Because despite the calmness of the present, love has always felt like sipping down a mug full of chamomile tea while the hot mist still collects upon my cheekbones, yet still biting my tongue the moment I realize it is destined to get burned.

I saw it coming then. I see it now, our figures floating together in the absence of distraction,
two humble souls existing as the tired stems of ripe cherries that have forgotten the taste of eternity.

teach me youth,

the way it fumbles down spiral staircases
and flutters in late summer wind,
how it forgets the existence of time
as if preserved in fear
like fireflies pounding tirelessly against the walls of our trembling hands on August evenings

for I have forgotten it,
the look--
eyes overcast and words crossing their arms
because they have grown too fearful
of making a mess, the shy first kisses of  tangled hair and secrecy.

teach me how to dance
with aimless feet, stumbling
as if light can only pass through
the opacity of hardened hearts
with the soft brush of innocence
that somehow neglected to paint you brand new.

it was sometime in april
when i discovered that your eyes
held galaxies and worlds
within a treacherous sea of green;
and that was when i knew
i was hopelessly lost
in the irises of your eyes
and you were lost
in mine

but now it's a frigid december day
and my heart still quivers
when i hear the sound of your name,
it's cold days like these
when i ponder upon the truth
i'm still lost in your eyes
but it's so pointless
and so lonely,
so tragic
because you've found your way out
and you're no longer lost in mine

it's been one whole year
one whole revolution around the sun
365 days of wondering why
you told me i was your everything
but you left it all behind

how could you leave everything behind?

you left me with empty hands
after i gave you the whole world
but i am not your sun
and you do not revolve around me like you used to

one whole year
of broken promises and mumbled friendship
and memorizing each other
like the backs of our hands
even though i'm not sure if
i still want to remember you
anymore

you're the throbbing pain
and also the heavenly relief
and even though i cannot stand the thought of you,
you still take up the most space
in my mind

There are so many other girls with perfect hair and skin and eyes and compared to them, I am a walking joke. I am an unfixable calamity of dark grey circles under my eyes from staying up all night because the thoughts in my brain always seem to bloom at the worst times. I am the weight of a thousand words that sit at the tip of my tongue but refuse to come out. So please don't ever tell me that I am flawless because that word is so far away from what I aim to be. At the end of the day, I want to be so incredibly flawed and real and incurably human but still beautiful because of what is inside my heart instead of what sits on my skin. I have slowly become a whirlwind disaster of running away from your toxicity. I am a hurricane of good intentions gone wrong but I can promise you that you'll never find a perfect person that could love you as imperfectly as I ever did.

Those days,
I remember them clearly-- the ones decorated in violence.
There was no one left for me to fight
but the distorted figure glaring back
in the ***** mirror,
the reflected face that suffocated my gaze,
exhaling new nightmares like shattered glass fragments of insecurity
dropped from every creaky fire escape
overlooking the collarbone roads
of my own demolished city.
Those days,
my heart hurt more than it desired to beat.
But the pretty words flowed out of my fingertips like honey,
poetry never hiding at the back of my throat
like something that was afraid of commitment.
It filled all of the empty spaces,
cursive loops imprinted upon the edges of time,
the gaps between my own hands rubbing together in the winter,
black ink serenading pale paper.
Never lacking, never losing.
But the war has since ended.
The battlefield no longer exists in the trenches of my mind,
monuments proclaiming love rather than defeat.
I now rise to the bittersweet taste of victory,
morning bells chiming in my ears
as if this is my first time hearing music. Days have blurred into warm colors and melodies of laughter, of faith, of newfound innocence.
I have learned that it is easiest to swallow life by adding a teaspoon of sugar.
It is easiest to live without the weight of failed attempts.

I miss them so.
The words rarely visit.
Rarely call.
They are quieter now, poetry confined to corners I cannot see.
They were only ever around to witness the gore, the blood, the fickle sweat.
And once they had witnessed the scars fade into pink,
they did too-- just like all of the hurt that had risen up out of my tender bones
and into the stars.

I am holding onto minutes
as if they consist of
a thousand red helium balloons
ready to ascend like mumbled prayers
into the atmosphere
the same desperate way I sense that
maybe,
you are ready to leave me

I have conquered time with a death grip,
dripping sourly with words
that cannot form at this altitude,
with worries that feel as if
they have both feet hanging off the edge
of a New York City skyscraper,
plummeting the way my stomach feels
every second that passes without
even a glimpse of
your fragile existence

for I am a windowpane
that will shatter because of
a gentle April breeze
or the caress
of a perfect lover, destined to break
like the fragile bones
of a skeleton that has forgotten
the knowledge of living

the last time I kissed you
I tasted blood in my mouth.

5 o’clock in the morning and I’m intoxicated by the thought of what could’ve been. I paint galaxies on my bedroom ceiling, desperately searching for the right words to let you know that my heart still sparked beautiful colors whenever I filled my mind with thoughts of you. Suddenly, it hits me like a strong gust of winter wind- that no matter how hard I wished for a sense of normality between us, things would never cease to change for the better. Too many sleepless nights, too many lonely sunsets have passed since that remorseful day. Too much time lost to recover the flame that had since been put out. I was numb to the core, trying to fix and mend something nearly irreparable that refused to die from my thoughts. I designed constellations on my walls, connecting them little-by-little each night, tricking myself into believing that there was still hope left, that someday our stars would align again. There was nothing, no one to confide into, and slowly the tiny sliver of sanity I still had left within me began to fade into an unfortunate nothing. Was it really gone? Our stories, our abundance of exchanged smiles, my collection of picture-perfect moments? Indeed, they were long gone, withering like the blossomed trees in the start of June. To me, those times were still so real, so picturesque, still engraved in my memory like a long lost yesterday. It was like a Tug of War, an innocent competition between two eager kids with their hearts set out to win. But after you were declared triumphant, you brushed yourself off, leaving me with nothing but the weight of a loss on my shoulders. 6 o’clock in the morning and I’m drowning in my own misery, trying to bury my sadness and my agonizing pain. But I couldn’t take my eyes off that bedroom ceiling, with a sudden realization that I couldn’t shake from my mind. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, as I wiped away tears, Maybe there’s still a little molecule of hope left somewhere in the world. The feeling soon escaped me and the night grew somber once more as I remembered that I was just a hopeless romantic swimming in a sea of her unattainable dreams. She was just in love with the idea of being in love, too tied down to reality to find the courage to let go. I had known it from the very beginning. He was gone, we were gone, and I was treading at rock bottom. .

You are not supposed to rip pages
out of books bound by human spines
or all of the pages will fall out
and disperse across the ground
like autumn leaves exhausted of trying.

I learned this the hard way.

If there is a cure or concoction
to heal a brilliant mind

I crave it,

because finding medicine to express
my mutilated madness
is like dying without understanding
the allegory of mercy.

He wants to understand what hides
under soft satin skin and apathy.
I see it in the way the crumpled lines on his forehead
form question marks when I cry
because there was never a reason
nor answer
as to why my heart always seemed
to perpetuate the memory
of autumn.

No, he will never know, curious as he is,
because skin is miles
and miles
and miles deep
plummeting down to a hollow core
of sickness
of sorrow
of solitude
that could dissolve all of his worries
but never my own.

I am running out of pretty words
to let them know that
my darkness
is not fictional.
It is hidden instead
under crimson lipstick dripping down
blood red sins on the white lace dress
I wore on my First Communion.
My mother does not understand
how my mind, of sixteen years,
has run out of purity—
casualties of fading light
and trembling hands that have forgotten
the dimpled smile on God’s glorious face
the day I was born.
I too, have forgotten that day,
instead dreaming of mornings spent
on my bedroom floor heaven
of rapidly-inflating lungs
and eyes that have seen the reflection of affliction
far too many times to be considered holy.
For I am the sacrificial lamb
slaughtered to the mumbled hypocrisy of praise,
blinded by the guilt
of every mortal sin collecting like bodies in silence;
the sound of shattered souls buried by seraphims.

How much grace can one mortal swallow?

I beg you.
Have mercy on me.

I am longing to get lost somewhere far, far away. Away from the routine hum of constantly pushing the snooze button. Away from the stress of misunderstanding and complication, the hunger of chaos and disorganization. I desire to grasp the entire world with my own eyes rather than with a microscope that can only be focused on untouched possibility. I want to view life in vibrant colors I've only ever been able to understand in my mind and to speak of my adventures in words that have never been written down. I want to drive down avenues that no longer exist and balance at the very top of a mountain that has forgotten the feel of footsteps. I am thirsty for the impossible. I am exhausted of falling asleep to the sound of my own heartbeat banging against my bedroom walls and breathing in air that has already been exhaled in past lives. I will never settle for contentment. I will never settle.

so much slander
is ****** upon the poet,
who sits uncomfortably
at the tip of every tired pen
aspiring to run out of ink

she will suffer
for as long as our streets
remain flooded with the blood of the innocent,
for as long as our wrongful hands
desire to invent new ways to tighten the ropes
of our own expired dreams, hanging exhaustedly
around the same necks
that have since forgotten how
to support us

and because of this,
the poet will sob
violently, the way she prayed
to destroy the sight of her own words
sinking down the clogged drain
in her bathroom sink

how willingly it swallowed
every remnant of everything
she could never bring herself
to understand

from the thunderous sound
of her father's kind footsteps
escalating the stairs after a long day
that will leave his back stiff,
to the absence of her mother's voice
the moment she finally decided
to listen

pain, she thought,
is a remembered affliction

and it is the poet's sin
if she refuses to shelter it.

there are still words knotted in her stomach,
tangled cherry stems waiting
for shy hands to unravel them,
the pungent scent of fear dancing slowly
in a dimly lit room where you
cannot see her

but you feel her,
innocent, blameless—

a soul with runs always sneaking
down the sheerness of her tights,
the one who revolved her days
around messy diary entries crammed underneath
the mattress she grew up dreaming on

and right now,
you can feel the weight of her eyelashes
fluttering against the warmth of your cheek
the desperate wings of an injured butterfly that knows
that there still exists something called love
drifting soundly down a river of juvenile apathy

it is at this particular moment in passing time
that she decides to dedicate her youth
to the one with enough courage to hide it
in the pocket of his brown overcoat

tell her you love her
before you grow old

i am the type of girl who is afraid of looking down
who shuts her eyes in glass elevators
and fears heights almost as much
as she fears herself

and the moment i met you was the moment
i decided to loosen my death grip,
realizing that i was exhausted of clinging to my high hopes,
suddenly feeling weightless, fearless,
flying away from the stranger i used to be,
flying away from the person i was
before i met you

they teach us poetry in school,
the kind we read in those dumb literature books
filled with stupid stanzas and rhymes
and words on paper made to make you feel something

i know you're not made of paper, and that
you aren't words or letters or rhymes
but you were the first person who made me feel something,
something so real, something so catastrophically alive
and i love you for that,
for being my favorite poem

i love you to the rooftops and to the skyscrapers and clouds
and i know i'll always have to keep my eyes shut tightly
and have to hold your hand so tight my knuckles turn white
but you are poetry,
you made me feel alive again

i wasn't afraid of heights,
i was afraid of falling
but you caught me anyway
and i love you for that,
for teaching me that falling doesn't always
have to hurt

home used to be
a fire crackling,
the furnace roaring
the stack of books
piled up by my bedside
and home was the
creaking stairs,
my favorite hiding places
and the words i could not say
written gently on my wall-

that was home before

but who would've thought
that home could also exist
in the eyes of a beautiful boy
who hid my secrets
better than the space
behind the cupboard ever could-
who understood what was written
on my walls, engraved in my mind
even better than i ever could have

home used to be
the place i would run to
whenever the skies bled
in somber gray,
and i wonder why
i always end up running to you
every time

I am just me,
a dreamer who keeps her eyes peeled at the sky, wide open like overflowing saucers
wondering, imagining the life that exists
beyond these familiar clouds and stars
that blanket gently over the sins of mankind

Staring up at the vibrant hues of the
sky's palette, I wonder if,
somewhere past the threshold of everything we know, there exists a parallel universe of sorts,
a timeless paradox or reflection
of the lives we have lived
and perhaps, the ones we have yet to live

Maybe somewhere existing outside
of our solar system, there is a girl
who resembles myself, with the same
passion to understand
encompassing the irises of her eyes,
and I wonder
if she has tasted the bittersweet flavor
of love yet, or if she had ever experienced
the emptiness of feeling it slip
between the hollow cracks
of her slender fingers

and I crave desperately to hold her,
to shelter her from her imaginary torture
and to be able to embrace
the faraway dreamer in my own arms,
and if I could, I would
send a shuttle into outer space
filled with enough love to orbit around
the uncontrollable expanse that lacks not only
gravity, but art-
the art of loving
and being loved


so I shout up at the sky, hoping that
the highs and lows of my voice
will resonate to her, and console the damsel
so that she will be greeted with care
rather than distress,
so I am able to send her the same love
given to me-
even when I believed that
no one in the galaxy
had any left to give

Ground control to Major Tom,
please send her my heart.

Sometimes victory is the first step. The turn of a doorknob. The cry for help. Victory is finally getting up to eat dinner after crying silently on your bedroom floor when the weight of the world collects like dictionaries upon your shoulders. It is eating that bowl of ice cream anyway, even when the same voices that have haunted you for years keep attempting to shrink you into a skeleton shadow. It is dressing up in the morning when all you want to do is let scorching hot water carve paths down your spine, forgetting the sound of all the voices you have ever heard because it causes you to wonder just when yours disappeared. It is reading a poem in front of your class, hands and voice shaking like palm trees in hurricane wind. It is realizing that some people will pretend to understand the fire of your soul yet cower in your presence due to the terror of getting burned. It is realizing that you are not immune to this, susceptible to creating madness in the nights you keep searching for, but cannot find, any air left to breathe.
It is admitting you are weak. It is choosing to believe the I-love-yous even when they hang above your head like chandelier glass. It is falling asleep shattered yet committed to wake up anyway. Victory is hidden in the idea that tomorrow, as lonely as today has painted it,


exists.

it is one thing to have
a pretty face, and another
to be beautiful

i don't want to seem
like i belong somewhere else,
the cover of a magazine,
or on some prestigious runway
i don't want to be
loved for the way
my hair shines under stage lights,
the length of my eyelashes

instead, i'd like to be beautiful
for the way that i love,
the sound of my laughter,
the way i spin words
into feelings
i want to feel utterly
and completely beautiful
for the way that i am,
for the way that i will be

i don't want to be just another
flawless face,
perfect to the core
i want to be drowning in imperfections
so that people can look around them
and despite all my scars, faults,
and flaws,
still find me to be
beautiful

"i'm sorry,"
you muttered
with a solemn glance

but sorry does not make up for
tear-stained pillows,
3 AMs spent wide awake,
fluttering butterflies
that always led to
disappointment

it does not make up for
midnight anxiety,
conflicted thoughts,
the hopes that rose
only to fall

an abundance of stale apologies
do not make up for
the countless times i needed you,
only to be greeted by
a familiar sense of lonely

when i think of you, my brain fills with white noise
like the muffled static on a TV screen, you were always something
that filled the void, that kept the emptiness occupied
but you're gone and i'm left here wringing my hands together
when the chorus of your favorite song comes on the radio, and
i cannot breathe, i cannot breathe, i cannot breathe
with all of these words draped around my neck,
with the weight of a thousand sharp memories that
still sting despite the thousands of times i've tried to demolish them

i used to dance endlessly to the beat of your heart,
but a music box can only wind so much, and now
i'm stuck listening to the same silent scream of
i want you, i want you, i want you,
i'm still addicted to every part of that familiar old voice
though i swore i was finally clean

every day that passes feels like the last page ripped out
of my favorite book, not even worth reading anymore
because i wouldn't want to waste my time reading a story
that ends without you by my side

i was in the seventh grade
when i met a boy in a red shirt
whose voice sounded a lot like home,
and i remember hearing them say

"silly girl,
you're only thirteen years old,
you don't even know what love is!"

but who are they to judge
when their ancient bodies
have already forgotten
what it felt like to be yound
and electrified?

who cares if it isn't their
dictionary definition of true love,
i'd still rather be young and clueless and trembling
with my veins pumping his name
over and over again
than having to spend the rest of my life
away from the only thing
i'll ever love enough to call
home

what is left with the poet
after her words have been silenced?

nothing but the static hum of passing time
crawling past every wilted heartache,
every kiss left out in the summer rain
to rot inside stained pages that have forgotten
the blistering sensation of abandonment

no matter how hard she craves
for them to return home,
the door remains propped open
with a crumpled love letter
stained with sweat and addressed simply
to a name she has not heard
since the last time
she listened.