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All Too Well (First Love version)
I remember a bus stop.
I can picture it- seven years later.
It was cold, so it must have been fall.
I remember your little bounce- you were cold. Already wearing a hoodie, so I couldnt offer mine.
I remember the glint of your teeth off the stop lights. Driving felt so far away then, waiting for the bus.
I remember your laugh on the wind- sharp, deep and cutting. I felt my own lips turn. I remember it was a tie between a grin and a frown-
because I could not openly love you then. And I was too sick to know how, anyway.
But nobody knew- not how I kept you sacredly to my chest. Not my quiet murmuring of worship. They didn't know the same altar I prayed at for your love that they prayed for your salvation. Or mine. Who knows?
Seven years. So many hours lost to thinking of you. So many poems. An entire book.
So, I know. I don't know you now, just as you don't me as must as you like to think you do from what I heard of you saying about me.
Despite it, I love you. Or maybe I love late, cold nights at a bus stop,
and awkward fumbling and hidden, anxious kisses.
I smile and swallow bitterly until im worried my face will stick like that.
And then I know it isn't true.
If soulmates exist, it is you. Because I cannot be rid of you though I try.
I don't remember your smell, or your touch, but I remember you.
I remember it all.
Aunt.
She is her.
Mostly noun, given,
And she is an English teacher and shall berate me should she find this;
but she is her. Beyond grammatical repair, or rule of prose.
I do not care, for she is why I am me.
And if she does see this- you are her.
My aunt- a woman more mother then extended family,
a woman who's heart can break and bend.
A human so giving nobody notices until her efforts are missing,
a human so sweet the earth cried the very day she got sick.
I remember it too well. I remember about her more than myself, like a broken bone.
It aches now, her pain- my bone.
Her feelings are mine- only I feel them.
I feel them miles away, and do I feel them deeply.
I react how she cannot, due to her heart.
I react when she is not sure how to.
I bow my head at her anger, and revel in her praise.
If my grandmother is the queen, my aunt is her heir beyond birthright.
She spent the last of her serotonin on my laughter.
She spent the last of her smiles on us all.
And I gasp from the severity of the loss.
She is still with us- which is why I reflect her pain.
She is sick. But she is her.
Within my scar tissue exists her- within my flesh,
within whatever is good to me is given by her.
Love is her. She is love.
Seven Years
I am not as I once was. My skin is thicker, cuts white and banded beneath ink, muscle strong, brain more settled. And yet I think of you. Someone who caused me so much strife in my youth, were the cause for much of my shifting mind and bleeding skin. The reason my muscles are bigger then yours.
I haven’t seen you in seven years and yet I think of you. I am unsure if I miss you, or perhaps being a teenager where everything was easy to digest. How do I digest this?
Seven years of hating you, seven years of having loved you. Is your impact truly so big, that I will always feel as like I am mourning something that never died? Buried a living creature that causes me more grievance then something as pure as love ought to?
Why do I still feel a pounding in the back of my skull like fists on a one way partition whenever I kiss, touch, try to love someone else? It isn’t fair.
I wonder if I ever cross your mind. I hope I don’t. I wish I do. I wonder if you feel my fists on the glass reverberating when you kiss, touch, love others.
I wonder if it’s the horrible twisted strings of fate, or if I am truly insane like you once said I was.
False God
When you said
you loved me,
was that before you knew me?
Before you saw my hastily bandaged wounds,
reopening from your constant prodding.
My snapping maw, from your pressing fingers
that sought out the me that I must have buried.
The me you created.
Out of shiny bridles and easy to fit,
upon the pedestal of manacles and Heavenly light.
But you cannot love something that has never existed,
has never been fitted in this world.
You cannot love something that wears my face but does not share my mind.a
That is not love.
That is a false God.
I Look After You
My therapist asked me, knowing me for most of my teen and adult years, if there is anyone I miss from who I have cut out of my life in those brief but annual cleansing stints I randomly have.
Soberly, no. Drunkenly, I know I do.
I miss myself. Miss the innocence and joy before it was taken in the end.
I think of myself, if I had to ask someone for forgiveness.
I would ask my baby self if she forgives me- but she would cling to my earlobe the same she does to her own for soothing, with wide and imploring eyes. I wouldn't need to say a word, so long as I held her. She wouldn't understand, anyway.
I think of my preteen self, so traumatized she isn't sure how to compartmentalize. I wouldn't ask her to. I would have slid into bed beside her as she weeped with wonderings as to why she wasn't good enough, and tell her she is beautiful- matted hair and thinning pyjamas and all.
My teen self wouldn't be so easily soothed by my presence. I would try a greeting word to start, but she would glare and spitfire hatred. I would brunt it with a bowed head, knowing she was simply too sick to know what she was doing.
But I'd return to her, the only one who ever did. I would find her that night, where her world fell apart, and tell her it will be okay. I would bandage her wounds, and kiss her forehead in a way she hadn't felt since she was that wide-eyed babe.
No- I wouldn't ask forgiveness for and from any of them, which makes this story moot. But I wouldn't have had to. I would have simply tended to them, tender and kind, until they would never be hurt enough to need to make amends. Until they felt filled with my love that there would be no one begging for a second chance.
I would have looked after them enough to not warrant the pain, nor the longing, for an apology.
Vulnerability
So many have called me mean,
which I have wished to be after years of catching on barbs.
But for the first time, to bear my soul, and be called scary...
I quirk an eyebrow. The left, as it is more harsh.
I clench my teeth enough to be seen beneath lingering baby fat.
I stare until I am sure my gaze pierces, until it hurts, until you squirm.
You had become to feel like home, after years of displacement.
And yet...
You do not know me, but you are in love with me.
I wonder what I must look like in your everlasting mind.
I smile as you proclaim it, knowing you mean it not.
I remember your thorns, still bruising my side,
"I miss the girl I fell in love with."
"You'll be better soon."
"You can be better. I know it."
It is not spoken with scorn, but I taste the bitterness like old beer on the back of my tongue anyway.
And what if I am better than I've ever been?
What if I am at home within a skin you are sure is a cover, despite the raw, bloody gore you are handed?
No. To love me is to know who I am, bared and all. This is not love.
But that is fine. I will balm my own wounds. I will cherish my ache. I will celebrate my vulnerability.
Familiarity
I look at the low-pixel reflection, my grimace mirroring that as myself as the two day old infant on the screen.
I hear my mother's coo- live beside me as she watches herself clutching me after exhausting hours of parenting, and her now, exhausted from... well, parenting.
Twenty-two years old. I feel my face quirk into a grin as I see my brothers emerge on the screen, and lean back on my hands. Four and seven at the time, them. I quip about how the latter's ears are large enough to hear colour, and wince much like my infant-self when the four year old presses too hard on my soft spot that it makes me cry.
I bite back my affection as the elder of the two goes into an all too familiar tirade about the other's idiocy. Nod understandingly at my infant-self's blank look as I cease my sobs to watch the strange display before me...
and like clockwork, there's a ring of the phone. I look to my mother- enttranced and munching at popcorn like she hadn't been there for all those harrowing years, and push myself up to grab the landline. Its my grandma, and I don't hesitate to beam at her familiar excitement when she hears its me rather then my mom. Her lilt, childish and bright no matter my age.
I answer her twenty questions from memory- yes, I ate, yes, my moms at home, yes she watered the garden...
... and I remember the last family video I watched, where she tended to a field of unruly grandchildren and friends all whilst feeding us and changing my diaper before anyone else could.
And for once, her questions register as not pestering, but a lifetime of love.
I remember I'm still that little girl, confused and curious. My heart bleeds with familiarity, and the baby inside of me beams.
Bittersweet
The coffee was too strong, even for my liking. I sliced a sliver of the tin fouled wrapped banana loaf and grimaced at the texture.
It felt like a rectangular sponge, ready to suck the moisture from my lips. I took a tentative bite, using the glass of water to force it down. It also gave the sponge-like cake satisfaction of ripping away moisture that wasn't mine.
I remember my mother's morning coffee in bed, and grandmothers homemade banana loaf. It tastes bitter without their touch, but with their memory, I add a dash of something indescribably perfect. Sweet. Love.
Gin
Gin tastes floral on my tongue, bitter and rich.
I swirl the liquor in my glass, the laughter of those beside me fading into a low hum.
I swallow my grimace, hopeful they don’t ask, for I do not wish for their pity. Which is why I drink.
I drink within moderation preset. I am aware as a daughter and sister to have a lower tolerance. But I also know my brothers and father have stumbled home more times than counted.
My eyes drift to the blinds, sighing in resolution at the familiar brick homes, mordor in my throat.
I check my phone- nothing. Nothing from those who claim to love me. I roll my shoulders as though it may dispel the pain. It doesn’t work for long. Like a nerve pulled too tight, with its ache so heavy it feels liquid. I seek out someone who may want to honestly kiss me, and yet, nobody.
And I swallow.
I ask for another: I am told I've had enough.
When will it be enough?
Brevity
It’s wrong, weird to dig my teeth into my lip at a song like some old habit that I don’t remember developing. It’s a song I didn’t even listen to when you left— and yet so many years later, when I’ve stamped it and branded it into memory of another, it’s yours. But isn’t everything about me? It’s all intertwined with you. You wouldn’t feel it. You don’t. But I do. I loathe and adore you and have nothing but a song you will never listen to as comfort.
You as a reader would imagine that to be to a lover, perhaps a friend. Scorned and burning But no- I think of myself, so different and so carefree and young. I imagine she must love me.
I hope she does.
I wonder when I may have lost myself. Or, perhaps, I had truly never known myself.
Surely I must have. From the habitual need to pull on my earlobe to soothe like I have been shown to do as a child on videotape, or from the familiar comfort of curling into a ball with a hand holding my weight beneath the oppression of my stomach.
Such tiny nuances that must mean I know myself. And yet I am lost, praying I make myself proud despite my failing attempts to live a life I hadn't wanted to last.
If only I could hold her, younger me, to assure her she had the brevity to withstand, and the longing to.