I Would Like To Be Loved

I would like to be loved

And perhaps this is selfish of me

But if the most selfish thing I do

In this life

Is long

To be wanted

So be it

For I have already

Burned for this sin

My desire a fire

That has left me scarred

And my heart

Disfigured

The last time I saw love was on my doorstep on a Sunday afternoon in winter. She looked pale and weak. Clutching a threadbare beige coat, arms hugged around her waist, already wilting daisies in hand. I could see a red stain blossoming behind the coarse material. I peak out the curtains, but leave the door closed. She catches a glimpse of me in the window and something like hope flickers in her iris. 

I let the curtain fall, my heart in my throat, then in my palms. It’s beating irregular. Not quite steady but not quite moving to the symphony in used to when love arrived. Love lays a palm against the front door. She calls my name. Barely audible over the wind but how could I mistake her voice. Seeping through the entryway and into my skin. 

My heart is still in my hands. I can hear love’s laboured breathing, just an arm’s length away. All I would have to do is turn the handle, a hopeful voice whispers. But I know this is a lie. Love is bleeding out on my door step. She is dying. I would have to do so much more to save her. Again. And I know that is why she is here. Because she cannot save herself. The greying supermarket flowers in her fingers are not just an offer, but a plea. 

I want to say “Love, no,” or “Love, I can’t,” or “Love, I’m sorry,”. I want to open the door and take her inside and treat her wounds and ask her to hold me as she heals. But I can’t. I can’t. Not this time. So I say nothing. I rest my back again the door and exhale. Or try to. All that comes out is a mangled sob and I clasp a damp palm across my mouth. She calls again, softer this time, nostaliga leaking into her voice. The muscle in my palms jumps and my eyes prick, hot tears flooding my vision. I press my back against the door, needing something solid. 

I have never held out this long. Always given in at the last minute, not ready to let her go. To let her die. Last time she had stopped breathing in the car and I waited a full minute before I jerked the car to a stop on the side of the highway and resuscitated her in the back seat. Begging her to come back. That I was sorry. That I could not live without her. She woke with a gasp and the promise of forever on her lips, as she always does. She has not been the same since then. She hasn't been the same for months, but especially since then. 

A bang rattles the door frame and I bite down on the soft spot between my thumb and forefinger, my back sliding down the door frame. It's quiet now, as I sit on the floor in the entereway. I squeeze my eyes shut and let the tears come silently, cradling my heart against my chest. I hold my breathe for a moment when I think I hear something on the otherside of the door, but it is just loves wheezing breath. I begin counting the seconds between her each inhale and exhale, as they gradually grow father and father apart. My heart is warm throught the fabric of shirt and my head is heavy. Soon love’s breathing stalls and does not pick up again. 

I count to ten and grit my teeth against the urge to toss my heart aside and pry open the door and breathe life into her. To yank her jacket open and shove my longing into her wound until the bleeding stops. To press assurances into the chest over and over until the spark returns to her eyes and she tells me everything is going to be okay. I’ve counted to twenty now and my back aches from this position on the ground but I dare not move. Not shatter this already delicate moment. Then I’ve counted to thirty, then sixty, then one hundred and twenty and then I loose track of the moments as my eyelids droop and rest tugs me under. I fall into a dreamless sleep with salt stained cheeks and my heart beating steady in my hands. 

When I wake, it is dark. As I peel my eyes open I realize it is the street lights that are casting dancing patterns across the tiled floor through the blinds. The only other source of light is a glow emitting from the kitchen where I must have left the switch on. My throat is dry and my legs ache as I stretch them out. It takes a second for me to recall where I am and why. A sweet flicker of a moment before I realize the weight of my heart in my hands is like lead. But it is whole. I breathe deep, feeling the ether stretch my lungs, and let my eyes close for an instant. Atleast it is whole, I remind myself. 

I shift my shoulders and adjust my poorly positioned neck that I know will hurt for days as I stand. I set my heart down by the door and glance out the curtains hesitantly. Even in the dark I can tell no one is there and I don’t know what I expected or what I feel. Disappointment and relief, panic and guilt, thread themselves between each other in knots in my stomach. I breathe deep again, hand finding the cool doorknob, gripping this understanding of the decision I have made. 

The door creaks and the cold of the night washes over me all at once, my breath fogging in front of me. I let my gaze wander across the landscape of the lawn and small porch. There is nothing, no matter how hard I squint into the black, there is nothing. I swallow and glance down where the welcome mat lays at the foot of the front door. Something lays there and I lean down to see what it is. My fingers brush over brittle stems. The flowers are long withered, a few frosted fallen petals remain, but most must have been blow to the wind. I set the corpses of the plants back down and retreat behind the door again, the cold air still clinging to my bones. 

I click the lock shut and rest my forehead against the white entryway. Everything aches and when I swallow it hurts but somehow I feel indescribably lighter. This time the weight on my chest is dense but not unbearable. Like in the aftermath of a disaster, when you’re standing in the midst of the wreckage, everything is awful and terrifying and you might want to fall to your knees and scream but at least the ground has stopped shifting. At least you know what you’re working with. You know the damage has been done and there will be no more anguish of breaking. Just the pain that comes with healing. And of course, it will hurt, but there is promise that it will eventually hurt less. And less. And maybe one day it won’t hurt at all anymore. Maybe. 

I lift my head and turn on the lightswitch. Picking my heart up off the floor, I make my way to the bathroom, where I promise myself warmth awaits me. In the mirror I marvel at my rid rimmed eyes and chapped lips. My wild hair and bear shoulder where my shirt has slipped. I press my fingers against the glass and sigh. I swallow my heart and feel the wound settle inside me taking a moment to readjust to the weight. As I peel my clothes from body, I catch a glimpse of something move in the mirror and my heart skips a beat. But by the time my eyes focus, there is nothing there. My gaze flits around the room but there is nothing. I grip the counter and steady myself repeating this to myself. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. She is dead. There is nothing left of her. Except memory, a disloyal part of me whispers. Except ghost. Except ghost, I agree relecutently. 

I undress and avoid letting my gaze snag in the mirror again. The water is turned on and before long steam fogs the glass anyways. Under the stream the cold melts from my muscles and some stiffness surrenders to the current. Here I sit with the knowledge that she is dead. That I let her die. I may not have been the one that dealt the killing blow but I let her bleed out on my doorstep. And she is gone. She may come back to haunt me occasionally, but I trust these instances will fade eventually with her memory. By trust I mean I hope. But I can not dwell on this. Cannot let the thought of her suffocate me. She is dead and I am not. I am alive. I let her die so I could live. And I will. I will. 

- Love will haunt you long after she is dead

You have softened all my edges.

And I am afraid

That when you leave,

(As they all

Inevitably do)

I will be left

Defenseless

Against

The world.

~

I run my fingers over all the places my skin is pulled taunt.

"You don't have to, if you don't want to."

"I know."

But I want to want to.

For you.

There is not enough space

Between the lines

To hold

Everything

I failed to say.

~

I wonder often

If they will remember me

As anything other

Than what I helped them forget.

So I make promises

Knowing they will be broken,

In an attempt

To collect sins.

Hoping

In the end,

I might

Cash them in

To see you again.

~

I say

I forgive you

But you tell me

It means nothing

Because you do not

Forgive yourself.

Then what am I worth to you?

What am I worth to you?

For are you so staunch in your belief,

That you do not deserve

To be loved,

That you would shatter my heart

To prove yourself right?

~

I tell myself,

If I could not make you love me,

I will at least

Make you

Miss me.

But I do not hold it against you.

For if I left me

I would not

Long for my return

Either.

~

I title this chapter

Lessons on forgiving

Myself

When I deserve it

Least.

In it,

Sorry

Is not used

Once.

~another compilation of thoughts only beautiful out of context

I met you when I was young. We were both young, but now I see it. I was 15 and you were older and kind and spent smiles like they cost you nothing. Maybe it was this illusion of abundance that originally tipped me into the fall but you were everything I never thought could exist for me.

My best friend introduced us in passing. I met you mid-morning in the middle of the week in the middle of a bustling hallway. Maybe this was the first sign that we would never be anything all the way. You made a joke about my name but it was all in good fun and to hear my name on your tongue made my palms prick. All I saw was your smile, brilliant enough to blind. It hurt to look at you too long, but I did it anyway. I was always a little bit of a masochist I suppose. You will learn this soon enough, when I love you so hard it hurts. When I manage to turn this soft thing between us sharp. But in fact, you won't. You won't learn this. And perhaps that is where we begin to fall apart. Or when I do. I begin to fall apart. Because we never seemed to do much of anything to you. We never seemed to touch you at all. While we tore me apart. Or I did. I guess it was always me doing the breaking, wasn't it?

We leave after last period to get lunch from the place near school you swear has the best fries. We miss 3 busses trying to figure out the route, the last one is on me because I can't run in flats with my school bag. While I walk, you sprint across the parking lot to buy our tickets but we're already too late. I don't want to watch the movie even if it's only 5 minutes in. I want to leave. I've wanted to leave since we waited for your food in awkward silence for 15 minutes but I swallowed and called it first date nerves even though we never said it was a date and I know now that it most definitely wasn't. And that's how things always were between us, weren't they? Me being let down by my own expectations of you. Me taking your kindness and taking and taking and taking even what wasn't there?

You let me pick what we watch instead since we're already here and pay for my ticket. I return the cost to you in the dark of the theatre. The movie is bad. In fact it's awful. I lean away from you and bite my nails during the sex scenes I didn't expect from the trailer. I wince every time I hear you shift, so sure you hate me as much as you hate the film, quietly begging for it to be over. We leave after it's done. I apologize. I didn't know it would be that terrible. You tell me we totally could have caught the original one we came to see and I nod, holding back tears that taste like shame. But you mean nothing by it.

It's summer, warm and sticky, walking across the parking lot.

I fell out of love with you then.

I didn't know it in that instant but looking back on it, this is the exact moment.

I realize there is nothing here. Nothing between us but space. There is nothing here, and the question is seeded if there ever was. The thought takes many weeks to root and bud. Months to flower and come to fruition. But it is planted here. Here, I keep searching for a feeling of comfort even if just in your presence but there is nothing to find. My stomach turns at my mother's missed calls, she's wondering where I am, who I'm with, and I'm panicking because I am still young. You offer me nothing but shrugged shoulders and it is worse because I know you mean well. Or rather that you mean nothing by it. And suddenly I know that I need you to say something. I need you to say something that matters right now. Or there will be nothing to come back to tomorrow.

But you don't. You don't walk me home. You walk me to the street across from my father's apartment building. Nod. One hand wave. See you later. Walk back across the street before the light can turn red again. You don't look back. And of course, I only know this because I look back. Stare after you. Not heartbroken yet. But gently being let down. For the next few days I would rather not think about you. I try many times to remake how it happened in my head but I'm grasping at threads. There is too little material to sew a new tapestry memory from stray comments and wayward touches.

After this butterflies were not summoned at the sound of your name, funny how easy delicate things die isint it. After this, I did not feel the tug of your orbit's gravity pulling me closer to you in a crowded room. Your words sounded less and less divine to me, I think this is because I started hearing what you were saying instead of what I wanted you to be saying. After this, the poetry about you turned sad, then angry, then ran mostly dry. There were no more tears shed over you in the bathroom around the corner from the theatre classroom because your promises were pretty coloured tissue paper flowers to me now. Good for decoration and conversation, but they would tear easy, for they were never meant to last. Never crafted to be put to the test.

We try again a few times. Every once in a while I find you at my locker at the end of the day and we try again. Painfully awkward, but we try again and again and every time I think it's over you're there again. Here is where you instill in me the inability to get over you all the way. You do it by accident. Or at least mean nothing by it. And I begin to understand this the hard way. It's hard because everything means something to me. For I have spent my life trying to squeeze enough from the nothings cast my way.

You ask me out of the blue if I'd like to go for bubble tea and I say I've never tried it so we do. My mother is at work and my sister is in school and no one is at home to expect me and I feel sickeningly giddy at the little rebellion. The silence is only half as uncomfortable as before. The other half-emptied of expectation and filled with acceptance. But the place is closed and this time I laugh at the inconvenience fate keeps gifting us. I tell myself it's a sign. One I'll look at later. We go somewhere else. Somewhere convenient. Somewhere familiar.

You buy me an iced coffee we playfully push the two dollars back and forth across the table as I insist to pay you back and you refuse. As a gentleman. As a friend. The spell is broken when you ask about a scar and I realize I could never tell you. Well, I could. But I don't want to. That someone like you would never understand. And you let the subject drop so easily. You let it all go so easily. Instead you check the bus schedule and walk me to my stop. You get on your bike and ride down the street and you don't look back.

Another time you meet me at the mall. My father asks to meet you so he does. You are the first boy I know that he ever meets. But of course, this means nothing to you. And so I try to let this mean nothing to me too. I link our arms together and it's easier to touch you. Without anticipation. You leave me after we eat cinnamon rolls and do not look back. And I always find myself looking after you. A part of me brought back to the piece of myself left in that movie theatre parking lot in the afternoon sun. But I don't ever really love you again after that.

And I am better for it.

We are better for it.

I am glad I still have you.

For I don't know what would have become of us if not for your careless gaze and fickle heart.

I do not know what would have become of me.

And I am grateful now, for the falling out of love.

- #1: reflections on falling out of unrequited love with him

When I was young, love was always big, but never so big someone out there couldn't fit it in a poem. I am less young now.

Once, I read about how grief is too big to write. That you have to paint it in negative space. You have to tell it in molecules. You cannot write the galaxy, you have to write the smallest star. You cannot write the torn fabric, you have to write the fraying thread. You have to write the empty hangers, you have to write all the extra hot water the shower now has, you have to write the tongue cutting itself on past tense verbs. You write the empty shoes, you write the unbaked banana bread, the red grapes only she ate growing mold in the fridge, you write the bed into an ocean unbearably vast.

I am less young now, and I realize you must write love like grief. And is this not the truest metaphor I have ever touched. For in this way, all the greatest loves do not have poems. For how does one write the peace into pieces small enough to be held by the craters in every o and b and p. I am less young now, and in this way I do not want a love worthy of poems. I would like one that could never be penned. That could never fit in the span of a few stanzas. I want us forever unwritten.

And life is funny that way.

In the way she gave me the ability to speak, only to render me speechless so often.

In the way she gave me a voice, and a dread of using it.

The way she gave me all the words in the world, and feelings none of them could describe.

And life is funny that way.

In the way she sends me desire for those who will never desire me.

In the way she gives me a heart made of grasping palms and nothing to hold.

The way she shows me religion then baptizes me in doubt when I most need to trust in something other than myself. And in this way she keeps me close. For what do I have if I do not have her?

And life is funny that way.

In the way she gives me the world to write about and yet sends me poems about you over and over and over.

In the way she compels me to write about forever and eternity and the vastness of space, while hypnotizing me with my mortality on a heart string swaying in front of me always.

The way she asks me to write about love and gives me only tastes of it. Watches amused as I pen page after page trying to recreate a feast on paper. Trying to quench the ravenous appetite she left me with, only to witness me fail time and time again. Smiling as I go to bed starving.

And life is funny that way.

In the way she gives me the will and yet no way.

The way she teaches me how to want, but not how to have, not how to keep.

The way she makes it my deepest desire to be known completely and yet my greatest fear.

The way she gifts me already broken promises.

And life is funny that way

By which I mean

Life is a cruel mistress

And every piece of my shattered heart

Is hers