My Love, There’s Never Enough Time Is There? I Always Say To Myself After I’ve Left You That I Wish

we roll around on the carpet floor, hugging each other tightly, pulling each other ever closer. we try to stay quiet, but whispers of “I missed you so much” spoken in the language of pleasure escape. we giggle at the intimacy of it all, two lovers ready to throw themselves off the brink of everything to stay in this dream.

the way your body melts into mine, like you belong here, like we were made for this moment. we hug and laugh and kiss and say “goodbye, lover, I’ll see you later!” and never worry. we help each other with our work and plan for a future full of sunflowers and paintings and dinner by the fireplace. we’re still arguing if we should get a dog or a cat, though. that playful love.

how my words slip from my loose gloved jaw whenever ur around. how I lie on your chest and hear ur heartbeat quicken like you still get shy when I come close. how you stumbled into my life and made a beautiful mess of my mind.

wouldn’t trade you for the world, my summertime boy, wouldn’t give you away for anything. and when we roll around the carpet floor, breathless and wistful and entangled, I’m reminded why loving you is so easy.

self destruction is an interesting thing!

my hair was wet and tangled, my clothes stuck to me like a second skin. your hands were reaching for me, desperate and frantic. but we’re laughing and splashing. you had dared me to jump into the lake and I had said, yes I’ll do it even if I can’t swim. what’s youth without a little death anyway? what’s life if we don’t test it’s limits? the lake was so cold but I loved feeling your body pull me from it. I loved knowing you’d always save me. I coughed and spluttered in between the giggles, shivering and shocked. you ask me if it hurts. it still does, my brown eyed boy. it still does.

and I think it always will.

“You are not real. You are a dream of a dream.”

— Henry Miller, from Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters Of Henry Miller to Brenda Venus (via violentwavesofemotion)

Forough Farrokhzad, from Another Birth: Selected Poems of F. F.; “In The Dark,”

you move & the wind moves with you, something honey, something bruised— in the way you chew on your bottom lip. nervous habit; delayed reaction. how in summer the world feels like a mirage of itself. hands that chain themselves to anything that refuses to let go: a leech, or brown muck. your teeth (grazing) the inside of my elbow. something damn frustrating about the way you give yourself up (to anything that’s foolish enough to take you) i.e the sea, the coast, where your shoulders meet, the leylines of your veins. & picture me humbly, please. picture me in evenings & earthly tones, only. & do not hold your breath when i go, slip. out the back door—silhouetted feline; precipitous, or better yet. picture (you), standing barefoot in the tall grass, picture the curve of your neck in malnourished light, & a puncture wound, in the now negative (space) you found me in: a flower bed emptied; the sun bleached out. — oh all i ever wanted / was a life in your shape // mitski

I loved you and then I didn’t and then I realised how wrong we were. I realised that your hands had not been welcome here and that even when I locked the door, you found a way to kick it open. I loved you and then I didn’t and then I realised I never knew what love was. all those terrifying memories that still feel too close and raw. memories that don’t feel like they belong to me. my therapist calls it abuse and I still don’t know if it actually was or if I’m just crazy and emotional like you said I was. I loved you and then I didn’t and then I was too sad to remember that my body isn’t a graveyard and things will be okay and I’ll never forget you or the things you did but I will move on. all those mornings spent in tears, the heart palpitations that were too urgent to feel like butterflies. your knuckles and the dark and then blinding light and then I have to explain away the bruises again to my mother. I loved you and you said you did too but you don’t hurt the ones you love. you don’t hurt the ones you love. I still loved you even when you did and I still don’t know if it was my fault or not.

I used to practise perfection in the form of open legs and a closed mouth, smiling and saying “hey I won’t be inconvenient for you, baby, after all I’m the granddaughter of the witch you managed to burn”. but god, I’m so tired of being propped up and jadaposed. so tired of the hackling in the street and the fear at night and the “I know you want it” from men who look like knives. I’m so tired of being told my body is too woman to really mean anything.

And I’ve grown tired of hearing speeches like the one I’m making now. I’ve grown tired of saying I was raped and I am black and I am a woman and that I want to make a change. screaming all these facts into a world that remains so deaf to me. deaf to people like me.

deaf to the little girls who are married off to men three times their age. deaf to the teenagers who are prey to older boys and men and teachers. deaf to the women in the workplace. deaf to the trans-girls.

grab em by the pussy and metoo and date rape and “oh my god, him too?”. what am I supposed to do anymore? how am I supposed to structure myself as a sexy woman but not as a woman whose asking for it? how can I explain to others that they should be mad that this world is on fire, rather than that it’s ashes are ugly? when did the common good get so political? I’m so tired of it all. so tired.

there are so many important things to resist and I’m still trying to tell myself that I don’t need to use sex as a currency. that I should not feel forced into it. that my body is my own. but it is not the most important thing about me. all this internalised self hatred for a body that has done nothing but exist.

“They’re all angels.”

— Keanu Reeves when asked what type of girls he likes x

Sweet and delicate