WintersLastIllusion

I'm terrified and I know there's nothing unique about this, but I'm standing here completely out of touch with the rest of the world, realizing for the first time that we all feel things a little bit differently, which is why this doesn't hurt for you at all. I figure the only logical reason for how you could do this as if it means nothing was if it really did mean nothing at all for you. It's easier to hate you this way. It's easier to forget you without the burn of your kiss against my skin. It's easier to stay mad if I don't have to remember the way that it felt. Most of all, I can forget this as if it's a memory in someone else's lifetime

I wonder if you're still breathing in the same pattern that you used to and if your life just picked up as it was before in a way that makes me insignificant and meaningless. I wonder if there's someone new — if she speaks in complete sentences and means it when she says she loves you. I wonder if you're doing better and if you'll get it right this time. I wonder, but I don't really care. That's the difference between now and before, because before I couldn't forget you and now, I barely remember you.

For two hundred and eighty four days, I woke up. I woke up with this bone-deep ache that never went away. I woke up to an incessant question playing in my mind that would never be answered. I woke up alone. For two hundred and eighty four days, I woke up without you when I woke up at all. The thing about time is that it never does make anything better. It just means more space to think. It means sleepless nights trying to figure it all out. When it went wrong. How to make it better. It means slowly losing my mind. But it never once meant getting over you. It's funny how the things you think you've forgotten always come rushing back when you

the problem is to me nothing is ever going to be as beautiful as you. i feel like i'm going blind. this would scare me except i know it's just that the whole world has dimmed down a few shades since i last saw you. and my eyesight will never adjust again because now all i do is look for you everywhere i go, even though i know you're miles away, because all i want is to see you smile again. even if it's the last thing i do. i want to see your face because i've gotten so used to seeing no one at all. it's too empty here. i hear his name and voice, feel his fingers on my skin and his breath against my cheek, but i don't see him. maybe he sees

I remember being seven years old, sitting at our scratched kitchen table and being able to see the moon through the reflective glass of the window over the sink. And I remember being terrified, because here I was sitting in same place and already the whole world had shifted and moved and rotated and spun and tilted and hurled through space at a rate so quick I could never comprehend it. To me, this was the sort of mystery you didn't try to solve. I remember being curled up against the solid frame of your body with your right hand claimed in between both of mine. Our pale skin blending together as I traced constellations on your palms. You la

i never feel colder than when i'm talking to you. i don't know what this says about us. but i know that i worry about the way you complicate something as simple as the beating of my heart. i don't think i love you. not yet. not since. not ever but maybe that's just the strong sense of denial i've built up in the past few months. i don't think i'll be okay. not now. not really. not quite. maybe you were good for me once but you're no good for me now. i often wonder what would happen if i stopped speaking for awhile since all my words ever do is make a mess out of things that should be easy. the thing is that when i'm hap

my heart beat still skips like stones. and i can almost see the breaks in the surface from where all these misconstrued feelings ripple out and dissipate. like drops of water on my window pane, bleeding together and streaming away. like dust in our airways, inhaled, exhaled and slowing settling until my whole world is covered with a thick layer of grime and i'm left wondering if this is what love is supposed to feel like. it is, right? because otherwise, i'm shy of the mark and even shyer of finding something new to waste my time on since these lips—they don't move as much as they should because i tend to let my heart do all the talkin

No one tells you your arms are the Euphrates or that your long legs are the work of a clever devil and a blasphemy I have grown to crave. No one mentions how your skin distracts and how your clothes take on new life every time you stand up and the sun makes riddles of your thighs. No one says your eyes are a lost mile of treason or that your lips trespass like pirates between the sheets and make sleep a forgotten god. And no one reminds you that the shape your voice takes when dawn stretches the sky, sends my reason fleeing like a thief.