My Name Is I LOVE YOU And All Of This Is So New And Bright. How Lovely It Is To Have You, Sunshine, After

💓💓

• “If Moses had seen the way my friend’s face blushes when he’s drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man” (rabbi yehuda al-harizi/judah ben solomon harizi, book of taḥkemoni iirc)

• “The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.” ( Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry)

• I want to stay on the back porch / while the world tilts / toward sleep, until what I love /misses me, and calls me in. (Dorianne Laux, from “On the Back Porch,” Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems )

• “I am sitting at my kitchen table waiting for my lover to arrive with lettuce and tomatoes and rum and sherry wine and a big floury loaf of bread in the fading sunlight. Coffee is percolating gently, and my mood is mellow. I have been very happy lately, just wallowing in it selfishly, knowing it will not last very long, which is all the more reason to enjoy it now.” (Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham)

•I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince” (Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door)

• “Put your heart in it” “My heart’s with you. I don’t have it anymore” (Dear Ex, 2018)

• "Why did you call me at the office today?” “I had nothing to do. I wanted to hear your voice.” (In The Mood For Love, 2000)

• I’ve dreamt about you nearly every night this week (Arctic Monkeys)

• This tweet

• Sharing a bubble bath on a rainy day, Santa Cruz, February 2015.

• Chungking Express (1994)

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.

womanhood is so divine. the world attempting to desecrate and compartmentalise it only makes me realise how holy my body is. every scar and curve and pore and hair. there is genesis between my legs. godliness. life that brings life. how dare you attempt to spit upon scripture. how dare you attempt to destroy something you can’t touch.

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.

turning lonely into angry and angry into occupied was a coping mechanism for so long for me. I mean, what else was I supposed to do with all this empty space inside me, hollowed from the inside out by my own mind? I tried to lobotomise myself, tried to extract all the bad like a field doctor without supplies on the battlefield: improvising, desperate, bloody- willing to do anything to just make it stop.

What is the word for a building that is on fire and that building is ruined and gone and everyone else can feel the effects of the smoke and the heat and that building is not a building but a person and that person is the i in my poetry, except it’s my real body that aches. The depression was physical just as much as it was mental.

All that destruction, pain, all the hollowness my illness brought. The “I can’t sleep but I’m so fucking tired”, “I can’t come into school today because the world scares me and I haven’t showered in weeks” and “I’m so sad and so numb” and “im sorry I have to cancel on you but I just can’t face the day”. I felt like I hurt people more than I hurt myself.

It’s hard to forget that part of my life, sometimes it feels like all the darkness never left. It still creeps on me, on days where I’m too tired or haven’t eaten. And I still write about it in the present tense. It’s still here. still here.

altogether too empty to really quite exist. not pretty enough to make people stop and stare but just attractive enough to make a boy fall for the spark in my eyes. I feel like half a person, a waxing gibbous moon. had the potential to be something wonderful. don’t want to be normal or ordinary but I really am nothing special. that’s the curse of living I guess. you gotta live with the fact that you won’t be an elvis or a bowie or a keats.

Ladurée Saint Honore rose framboise

“Sure I loved him - too much. And he loved me, only not enough. I just want someone who thinks I’m number one in his life. I’m not willing to accept emotional scraps anymore.”

— Amy Tan (via purplebuddhaquotes)

here darling. summer isn’t so bright this year so come lean on my shoulder and baptise your sorrows in the valleys of my body. I know you’re crumbling under the weight of it all so lean on me until you’re strong enough to walk again. some flowers don’t have sturdy stems, and that’s okay. doesn’t make them any less beautiful, right? let my arms be your peace until the world outside stops sounding so much like violence, the chaos and busyness of it all. come, my love. mind over matter. you’ll start feeling like yourself again, I promise. love is being the hook, line and sinker. love is being the fish and the fisherman. love is knowing that sometimes it isn’t 50/50, that sometimes I must give more than I take. but love is also knowing you’d do the same for me any day of the week.

childhood trauma culture is constantly seeking validation because no matter how many times it is confirmed that you were abused, you can’t help but feel like a fake because others have had it “worse” than you or the abuse wasn’t “bad” enough