love story

believe me when i tell you that love is not part of my story. believe me when i tell you that my life is not a love story, that no matter how i’ve tried to write it out, how i’ve tried to bring the shape to life, i am met with nothing more than disillusion & half-baked cakes. believe me when i tell you that the blanket my dead dog is wrapped in contains more love in it than will ever be sealed into my skin. & believe me when i tell you i know how to love, took all the courses, aced every master class. i stitched poetry into my veins, & candlelit dinners into my tongue. i sank into the river, i lit the lavender, i held it to my lips & rubbed my spit into your skin. i heard the silence in the echoes, prayed to aphrodite while laced up in your blood. i could have held you until all the stars were visible in the night sky. i could have loved you until everything was deafeningly white, but i was too many ounces for the champagne flute on your mantle. & too many ashes to be held in your porcelain tray. i was unwrapped & left to melt in the sunshine, all the ants returning home to their queen. & when you tried to refreeze me, i could never form around the popsicle stick again properly. my elements & atoms all black & broken & fried in the heat of an august burning so loudly, i had to cover my ears & shake all the bees out of my skull. you wrapped me in dirty rags & spun me round & round, kicking up a waltz, a foxtrot, a tango in my bones. you wrapped me in dirty rags & set me adrift on the river styx. could you hear my voice singing as i sailed away into the black hole? (or did it sound more like screaming from your end?) i never learned to build a bird house or make friendship bracelets or how to stop my words from committing perjury against my will. now i’m left with feathers & cages & fraying nots & cease & desists & lists & lists &…lists. & a voice that won’t stop reciting robert frost in vonnegut’s intonation. there are nations forming in my blood cells, revolutions in my pixels & bolsheviks in my heart beats. i want to build the school, the chapel, the libraries & the muskets. i have within me, all the fairies ever born from baby laughs that never were. i have within me, the capacity to recreate heaven with a swirl of a tongue, the lift of a hipbone. but summer couldn’t catch me, & autumn couldn’t leave me, & winter could never find the warmth needed to defrost me, & i flew with the fledgling kisses of spring, of me, the essence of me, rising higher than the empire state, a fate i have known since the recitations of disney princesses & first kisses. & all i can do is worship the deep breaths & the freely given touches of people who can’t remember how to spell my name. sound it out with me: y-o-u-r-s, something i will never be. but m-i-n-e mine mine mine all mine i can have all of me on the tip toes of my tongue, suck it back into my lungs, & blow it like a bubble onto the breeze. seized once again by life & thrown back to asphalt that has been repaved three or four times since last i licked it. everything you see is a performance, a show, carefully cultivated for your enjoyment, entertainment, appeasement, pleasure. i treasure bits of me that you’ll never allow yourself to see. i cannot count the amount of ways i’ve been forgotten, left behind, elapsed. cannot make anyone see me correctly through the kaleidoscope. & i have too much debt to invest in a telescope to explain to you the way we are the stars, the stars are us, everything all comes back to dust. sweep me up & toss me out & complain that glitter sticks to everything. & there you are, around your kitchen table, still picking bits of me out of your clothes, trying to recall when this was spilled & by whom & how you’ve managed to walk around with it buried in the fabric all this time without even noticing. because that’s how i love you. in such fundamental flakes & pieces & building blocks, that you fail to notice it’s there until you try to pluck the shimmering bits from the threads & the whole sweater comes undone, right there, on the kitchen table you could never bear to sit at with me. i never learned to knit because my great grandmother didn’t want us in sweat shops. i can’t stop longing & reading drugstore paperbacks & writing fanfiction about shows i’ve never even seen. meaningless, the endeavors & the dates & the butterflies. when no matter how this is written, the ending is the same every time. a sense of purpose & of glory. but believe me when i tell you, love is not part of my story.