Smile (04/22)

Smile (04/22)

I don’t know how I had survived all those years before I met you. 

With that red-hot anger that thickened my fragile skin and cursed my hands into fists, I’d only ever known spite. Resentment for those who saw the world in a more vibrant shade, those who could channel such calm dispositions amongst the silent chaos that only seemingly progressed with every rapid breath. Those who could forgive. Those who could forgive and forget those who had so easily kissed bruises into their skin and took what had never been theirs to take away, let alone feast upon with prying eyes.

My mother had taught me that above all other actions deemed immoral and dirty and delicious, forgetting was the greatest sin. To forget was to be weak, and to be weak was an invitation for your untimely death.  A delicate disposition was a short skirt in the wrong part of town on a dark night. Weakness was asking for it. Pleading for autonomy to be ripped from a body that no longer belonged to anyone but the taker.

And so I kept my fists balled a little bit tighter every year as a reminder that I’d made it a step further in an impossible game. I held them so tight, they’d refuse to unwind every night, even as I closed my eyes and prayed to an unapologetic God. Even as I dissociated into another existence that promised a peace I could never verbalize, a color I’d never seen and languages I’d never heard. These illusions would plague my illustrious dreams and yet soon I’d awake, soaked in worry and aching between the skin of my knuckles.

They said stress could kill you. I worried more in an effort to prioritize the inevitable.

And then I met you.

With indescribable eyes, a calm demeanor, a 401-K and a pair of blue-jeans with a hole in the right back pocket that you’ve forgotten to patch up for the past five-years. You’d dropped out of film school and re-enrolled in an art program with no promised job market because the creation that is emitted from your loose fingertips brings the biggest smile to your chapped lips, one larger than any billboard with your name could ever produce. Your socks would never match, you wait a week until the deadline to file your taxes, you can speak two languages, but you could never remember the quadratic formula.

You were beat up by a group of boys when you were eleven for trying to save a little girl's lunch money from being stolen. You lost. It was cliché. She had cried at the blood on your skin. That was the only fight you had ever been in.  At least with your fists. You’d vowed that words were to be your defense from that day on. More illustrious, powerful, ornamenting. Less lonely, bloody, and sure, you may never win, but you’d never succumb to that guilt that’d arise from experiencing fear in another’s eyes. 

My mother would’ve called you weak.

Shit, I would have too, if it was not for how you’d relinquished my own hands from their treacherous grips of angst and freed my body from its imminent verge into an automated, aggressive response that was hardwired into my code. You deprogrammed an out-of-date, predisposed manufacturer mishap. You recycled what should have been melted and reborn into another something. 

You made me a nothing, which was everything. 

(NOTHING: to love and laugh and live)

I don’t know how I could of ever wanted the world to end if I knew you’d been roaming it for years with a smile on your lips and your hands in your back pockets, a pinky finger peeking out of that tiny rip. I think the wrinkles on my forehead have faded since you’ve held my limp hand. I hope to hold it tighter for every year that passes, only to let it go to wave to our neighbor across the street from our home. 

If only I had known all of it, all of the pain and violence and scars, would have led me here. 

I probably would've smiled more.

-lauren a.p

love's half-life

Does love have a half-life?

Cause I swore I've felt you amongst my bones the minute my feet trailed through those salty waters

Serene as the salt stung the scars that danced upon soft flesh

Forever and evermore

Those feelings painted me a fool into the picturesque background of stoic complacency

A chaotically delicate stranger in the midst of familiar faces chasing your towering shadow in a blistering heat

Vying for an unobtainable attention that belonged to the blue eyes of someone center stage

And i'd pray for sinful desires

To have what should not be mine and your Midas touch upon my surrendering body, hot and heavy and deplorable and sweet

A melancholy only discoverable in the afterthought of pleasure

As i'd watch you walk into unsurety in my rear-view mirror

"Don't trust no man" aching within my core

My unrelinquished hold upon your fading hand

My inability to lose something that'd been taken from me:

A disrespected personal vow of humanity

Lust and clementine hues emerging from July's rainy summer afternoons

A constant reminder of my still-beating heart and filthy conscious and greedy needs

and your unrecognizable face

But no sweetest taste or glaring moon or rough grasp could compare to you

Nothing could wash away the bruises that licked the nape of my throat

Oh what will I ever do with these hungry thoughts?

-lauren a.p

that missing piece

I think there is something missing in me

gone, a runaway into that great, bright light

euphoric and serene in comparison to this lackluster realm of nasty disrepair

and a finite ending

It was small, innocent and fragile

a piece I hadn't realized had escaped

until roaming fingers intruded the hollow hole

of a naive memory wrapped in a child's hands

Maybe I was far too sensitive

too ill-equipped

to deal with the neon waves of trembling emotions

as I failed to intercept its getaway

in an effort to make myself complete once more

Since it had gone missing

my mother began to say

I was always in a hurry to go nowhere

hastily waiting with anticipation

but when I would get there i'd just stop

and relish in the chaos

complacent in the anxiety

-lauren a.p

the grounding of the five senses

She tells me to ground myself

In an order to escape the realities that scream perversion into apathetic ears

Five sights, Four feelings, Three sounds, Two scents , One taste

A tree, a bottle, a child, a pen, a bed

My skin, its scars, a permanent frown, the age lines of someone far too young

A simple song, my uneven breaths, static

A fading cologne and fresh nicotine

Blood upon my tongue

-lauren a.p

when kafka said ‘you wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it’ and when brontë said ‘if you ever looked at me with what I know is in you, I would be your slave’ and when Sartre said ‘if I’ve got to suffer it may as well be at your hands’

kinder than man, athea davis