A Brief Primer For The Hopeless Days, Part 2:

how tragic we were. my therapist called it abuse last night. I don’t know how I didn’t see it. you would make me go on runs to lose weight and i’d say yes, anything for you. you’d guilt me into fucking you. call me fat and my body less desirable. how tragic it was. how I desperately wanted it to be perfect. how I watched everything we had disappear between my fingertips. I lost a part of me I thought I need. slowly. like baby teeth.

it was for the best. but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

in the kitchen baking cake, dodging our cats underneath our bare feet singing to amy winehouse with wooden spoons as microphones. god, don’t I love you like flowers love the spring, sweetheart. god, don’t you look beautiful with your head titled back belting out back to black, sunlight streaming in through the window, with a mouth full of batter and a heart full of love.

salting wounds with poetry, and counting losses with a pen that’s run dry. tomorrow will be one year since you hurt me for the first time (oh how quickly time flies). and it angers me that everyone can still read your name in between these lines, that your pulse is still the rhythm of my poetry (and my life).

how casually you haunt me, old friend. i am no longer afraid of the memories you left on my skin (though i moved cities to escape them) so perhaps i can call this a year of growth. but is it really, when i spent months trying to fight the urge my bones had to rearrange themselves into a different woman?

the 29th was hot last year, and it is hot today too. but i’m not that girl who was complacent in her own destruction anymore, no. ive left the demolition site for good.

now, i kiss the girl i was and i thank her for staying alive, hold her and say that i’m proud she survived.

“Nemesis inhabited a dark paradise of her own making. She never held back. I loved her for her frightful hatred, her frightful love. I admired her stunning passion for revenge; the mercilessness in her eyes.”

— Lola Ridge, from To the Many; Collected Poems of Lola Ridge; “Hellish,”

“I used to dislike being sensitive. I thought it made me weak. But take away that single trait, and you take away the very essence of who I am. You take away my conscience, my ability to empathize, my intuition, my creativity, my deep appreciation for the little things, my vivid inner life, my deep awareness of others’ pain, and my passion for it all.”

— (via purplebuddhaquotes)

Trigger warning:

I tried to end my life exactly a year ago today. I came dangerously close to dying, spent weeks in a hospital. my life completely changed. this morning I woke up early to a quiet world, save for some birds outside my window. I saw the night change to dusk turn to morning and couldn’t help but remember how I would’ve missed something so wonderful if I died. how I wouldn’t have seen the flashes of orange and gold and honey swirl and change in the sky. how the endless black turned to sunshine. how depression didn’t win.

coffee, the sunrise and the buildings awash in the light of a new morning all around me. how lovely is it to be alive. to experience all this busyness and splendour. how the clouds whisper good morning and the heavens themselves shine through each crack in the sky. how the sun calls my body to wake. how the birds tell me today is a new day and aren’t there just endless possibilities. the promise of a new sunrise makes me so glad I’m still alive.

You deserve all the happiness in the world, and I’m sorry you deal with so much pain. I love you, and I’m always here for you.

it’s getting colder and I miss watching the condensation of your breath form and disappear in the air. the iciness of your blue eyes, the chill in your stare. winter boy, you said you never loved me. winter boy, I have so many questions: was it all real? why can’t you look me in the eye any more? how did you forget me that easily? 

winter boy, how did our love get so cold?

am I condemned to a life of longing? seeing you laugh makes me go all nervous. watching your eyes light up as your grin threatens to shatter your cheekbones and the way the sunlight hits your hair in the summer as you twirl and twirl and twirl.

or the way your breath forms a cloud around ur mouth and condenses into the chilly night air in the winter. i’ve watched and witnessed and drowned in all the tiny things you do. and god, I’ve fallen in love with each of ur subliminal actions. each tiny quiver that your body makes. it fills me with want. i want. i long for you.

is it going to be like this forever? am I condemned to a life of longing? I would throw myself off the edges of your hipbones under the covers and drown in the tiny rivers under the translucent skin of ur wrists or sin in the holiness of your sweet kiss.

holy holy holy. if god had seen the way your eyes light up with happiness when you see me or the way your hair swings behind you like telephone wires in the breeze as you walk ahead of me he would have not written that girls should not lay with girls. honeyb, you are the most religious thing I’ve ever come close to. moans like a choir, hands clasped together in wanting.

i am condemned to a life of longing.