I Have This Reoccuring Dream

I have this reoccuring dream

In which I am loved.

That is it.

That is the poem.

Short.

Because it never lasts

It never lasts.

I think if I have to come undone for someone, I would rather it be you.

Which is to say, I would prefer it to be you. Which is to say, I would like to unravel, and I would like it to be at by your hand. Which is to say, I would like to earn the honour of being loved by you. That I would like to have the pleasure of loving you unconditionally.

Because I think that if I were to give you my heart, you would treat it kindly. That if I were to show you my scars, you would memorize their pattern. That if I were to bear my soul to you, you would bear yours to me. I would like to love you and be loved by you, if you think you wouldn’t mind it. 

Because I know you will always offer me the hot water for my shower first. And even if I never take you up on it, I know you will. I want that with you.

I would like cabinets over flowing with tupperware and glass jars and old ice cream containers in the fridge filled with your mint chutney. I want bookshelves crowded more with your hand bound make-shift notebooks than novels. I want to grumble about stolen covers as I wake chilled in the morning and laugh it off clinging to you for warmth instead.

I want sunlight filtering in through our curtains on Saturday morning to dust your lashes and cheeks and still being allowed to be the one to wake you. I want to watch you dance with a broom across the living room (as I wipe down the kitchen counters) singing to a song from a musical I haven’t listened to but have become familiar with through moments like these. I want you to try to teach me how to cook and not mind when I mess up the soup I attempt to make you when you fall sick. I want to be there when you are sick. 

I want to be allowed to care for you. I want to do so many loads of laundry together we forget who’s pjs belong to who. I want to stop caring about what belongs to who with you. I want to feel you slip into bed next to me at 3 am still scented with your favourite take out I left on the table for you because I knew you would be home late. I want that with you.

I want to memorize your favorite take out order and how you like your tea. I want to memorize at least 75% of your playlist. I want to be allowed to hold you when no one else is. I dont care if I’m always your plus one but I want to be the first person you call when the night is over. Your tipsy phone call filled with soft smiles and hiccups. I want to be the person you come home to. I want you to be the person I come home to.

I want to let you convince me that we should get a cat. Even though I have never owned a pet in my life. I want to realize it has grown on me as we both hold fast to your pillow in bed while you are away because it smells like you. 

I would like to be allowed to miss you, in a gentle aching kind of way. The kind tinged with the reassurance that you will be coming home to me, eventually. 

I don’t care what the books say. I want to hold your hand until the butterflies migrate out of us and we watch them flutter along the ceiling dancing with ribbons of sunlight. I want to know you until your presence evokes nothing but peace. I want to find peace with you. Which is to say, I would like to, if it is all the same to you. 

And there is nothing left unsaid, and yet a million things unheard. The chasm between us widening and deepening and every word tumbles down into the depths and we remain. Sore throats and hoarse voices and strained eyes trying to make out the details of your face that drift farther away with each passing eternity. And I suppose, that we could jump. But who knows what awaits us? How far we will fall. If We will hit the bottom alive. If we will drown in the accumulated sea of sentences that have amassed over the years. If we will see each other the same in the darkness. If we will ever resurface.

But I will jump first. If only to know it will be your voice that drowns me. If only to attempt to consume everything you ever tried to say before it devours me instead. If only to be suffocated by your truth. If only to be laid to rest here, amongst the sins we birthed together. Here, next to the slowly disintegrating corpse of our love. And perhaps I will never know peace. But I will have known the whole of you, And that would have been enough.

Fridge light starlight. Coupled with moonshine beams sifted through apartment blinds. Bare feet, barer legs, band t-shirt ball gowns. Cool hard wood floor only staining the tips of our toes because we are mostly floating. Teetering on the cusp of forever. I promise i won't let you fall (unless you ask me to). Come a little closer, little miracle, and let me warm the tip of your nose with everything I cannot say. Butterfly kisses that leave nectar residue on your cheeks, the syrup gently trapping dreams drifting through the ether. Swaying to a melody you hum already half asleep on my shoulder. I hold a galaxy in my arms and feel both infinite and so so small.

Wishes made over milk and cookies, too many to count,  all of them tasting like childhood. Crumbs of innocence litter the tiles of the kitchen floor. Sticky fingers and bottomless appetites giving way to eternity. Giggled promises made under comforters muffled in pillowcases. They absorb our whispers into their threads, keep us warm long after the chill of silence settles us. We say little. Listen to our heartbeats. Melt into the darkness. Become constellations. Hold the universe between us in our cupped palms as we drift away. Wake to find we have suffocated it as we slept.

~There will always be more poems for you, my love ♡

In another universe the sky is always pink and I didn't give up on you, in another universe I'm a better person and magic is real and in an another one we still walk around the streets at late night holding hands and in another, we are together

If no one heard it, did it happen?

If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?

(The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab)

Proof of my existence:

I am my unmade bed

My week old unfolded laundry that was Fresh once

I am the disappointment in my mothers eyes

And the scars I have left on lovers and strangers

I am my clothes I have donated

And my compilation of pintrest boards the innocent scroller will accidentally stumble across

I am the the jokes I penciled into the walls of my middle school bathroom stall

I am the dust I leave behind

Dead skin cells, reminder that they were living once

I was living once

I had once had the pleasure of laying my palm against the surface of something tangible and it felt the contact as much as I did

I am the peices of myself I have left scattered in the people I have let hold me

Long enough for parts of me to become caught under their fingernails and in their eyelashes

I am not my mistakes

But I am their consequences

I am shrapnel scars left by the promises I shattered

I am the pastries I have bought

My coin accumulating into something greater than it once was

And in that small way I make someone's dream a reality

And in that small way I am immortalized

I am the corners of novel pages I have folded

And the sentences I have left highlighted and the notes I have scrawled in its margins

I am the half finished stories I wrote in the 6th grade

I am my poetry

And the things I have discarded

I am my clouded breath dancing on the cold wind momentarily before dissipating

As it becomes one with the ether forever adrift

And in that small way I am immortalized

I am my embarrassing childhood photographs

I am the energy you spent on me and the time you wasted on us

I am the things I have created but perhaps more the absence left in the wake of the things I have destroyed

I am the stains I have left and the sins I have committed

Out of spite, out of desperation, frivolously or unwittingly.

I am the way my name burns yours tounge when your mouth tries to wrap itself around its pronunciation and the scalding memories

I am

I was

here.