because you asked me what's on my mind and i don't know how to answer like a normal person; here is a poem.

i've been thinking lately about
                  skin

catching myself staring at the stranger
      on the café bench

wondering if
           the dimples in his cheeks would
                      feel the same as yours
           with my nose pressed into the crease

[if i could ever love him if they didn't
 if i could ever leave him if they did]

how the cab-mans callouses
    compare to yours
        held tight against my ribcage —
     that extra friction
                      sending me over the edge

if the workman's arms are also used
             to wrap themselves around someone
                               soft and breakable
         when he puts down his saws and hammers for the day.

・・・・・

i've been thinking lately about
           forgiveness

whether you can find some for me
     when this all goes to shit

[if you can start storing it up now
 and slowly letting us go
 before we have to]

and whether i can find any for myself
         for taking it this far

knowing that this is going to
         break us both —
                       differently.

S.

{Photo: Утро вторника}

unanswered —

questions for the woman i was last night 

how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps?

how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short?
why do you find the unavailable so alluring?
where did it begin, what went wrong, and who made you feel so worthless?
if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you?
all this time, you were begging for love silently
thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you
you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin
and what about the others that would do anything for you?
why did you make them love you until you could not stand it?
how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful?
where did you learn this, to want what does not want you?
where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?

by warsan shire

{Photo: Ennevia Flickr}

lessons .

things i wished i'd been taught:

        how to respond to a man that won't leave him angry
or me sad.

        no.
reverse that:

          that won't leave me sad
or him angry.
 
                     there.

i think that makes a difference.

                      there.
another thing i wish i'd been taught:

                  how to put my needs above
                      someone else's wants.

         my whole life has been filled with firecracker men
loud and fast and angry
      that burn for a second and then blow up
                          in my face
           and disappear in a mess
                            of smoke and debris.

                                               that live for the reaction.

                and i don't think i've ever been taught
                                 how to stop a fuse that's already lit.
                                          or where my body will be
                                                                                                     least likely
                                                    to get caught by the shrapnel.


                i wish they had been taught to be softer
i wish i was taught to be stone.

S.

{Photo: © quentin de briey/photography}

the art of being destroyed .

i never thought we'd get here.

when it came to you and me
i had begun to believe that all we'd ever be is
two lost causes
staring across crooked timing with inaudible 'what ifs' awake on our tongues.

two broken-compassed travellers
who could never stay on the trail long enough to collapse under
the same night sky.

but now i see
that we are two stories about the same moment
that sound nothing the same
and yet are both true
and both beautiful.

i was a shipwreck and you were the ocean
and no matter where i went
i was always going to drown
and you were always going to swallow me whole.

S.

{Photo: Memoriste Flickr}

no .

you hurt me with twisted meanings and
half-formed confessions

with ripping out words from my mouth and
spitting them back; ugly, gruesome, deformed

you are not kind, or soft, or forgiving or
capable of imagining the intricacies of another human heart

you are rash and unyielding and
i hoped i would never have to meet your eyes again

but you've pushed back in and
made me feel small in the places i once felt strong

you have no right standing in my sunlight and
casting me in shadow

but i find myself weak in your dark and
there's a two letter word i can never seem to force out from behind my teeth
when you come near

S.

{Photo: Peta Clancy Works}

Dear Moon

          We blame you for floods
          for the flush of blood
          for men who are also wolves
          and even though you could pull
          the tide in by its hair
          we tell people that we walked all
          over you
          we blame you for the nights
          for the dark
          for the ghosts
          you cold unimaginable thing
          following us home,
          we use you
          to see each others frail
          naked bodies beneath your blue light,
          we let you watch; you
          swollen against the glass
          breathe a halo of steam
          as we move against one another
          wet and desperate
          like fish under
          a waterlogged sky

by Warsan Shire

{Photo: via We Heart It}

semantics .

"And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts."

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

{Photo: P.H. Fitzgerald, 46/60)

timezones .

despite it all (the whole heavy lot of it) i still believe that your hands contain magic and your heart is made of softer things than you pretend.

i sometimes think that our souls were created to fit into each other but something went wrong and somehow we became just a wavelength apart. its as if time got wrinkled slightly, so that you show up too early and i too late and our souls still fit but we are never aligned enough for it to happen.

the nine-hour time difference between your front door and mine has a way of reminding me how distant our lives have become. a gap i'm not sure can be closed simply by boarding a west-bound plane to where we left off, although i'll be sure to let it try.

but nevermind all this. what i wanted to say is that i heard you were doing well, and i really hope its true (i only wish i had heard it from you).

love anyways (always),

S.

{Photo: Kylie Parks Flickr}

abyss .

You asked me for my deepest darkest secret. A secret I'd told no other living soul. 

What I think you may not understand about secrets is that those type are not down in the depths without reason. They aren't there to whip out at cocktail parties or ballet lessons or even at 3AM in the bed of your best friend who you tell most-everything to. They are absent for a reason. 

I think when you asked for this secret you meant to ask for my vulnerability, but what you asked for is more than that, and you need to understand this. 

Because the kind you asked for is so ugly that you do not even tell it to yourself. It's something you know is there - you can feel the weight - but you cannot look it squarely in the face. That's why it's kept underneath. 

Someone somewhere once said ignorance is bliss and I believe them, because once you know the deepest darkest part of someone, you cannot forget. So I can tell you things I have told only five, two, even one other person, but don't you dare ask for more. 

You cannot handle dark and deep. This is what you need to understand.

S. 

{Photo: Elif Sanem Karakoc}

solidarity .

no one expects you to survive this
we are all mortal here
[and in the moments you forget, the world
will either seem too big for you
or you will feel bigger than it
and neither one will do you good
or change the fact that]
we are all mortal here.

S. 

{Photo: Margaret Durow Flickr}

I Don't Believe You.

He said I love you and it was soft and drawn out and utterly believable in every way it could be but I still didn't trust the earnest eyes and parched lips.

He moved his fingers on my hips like he was tracing the outlines of his heart or marking paths between my freckles. 

An organ in my chest moved in ways I thought could equal love, but it didn't quite make sense because of logic and basic biology. Because I know sensations aren't always real: you can feel heat when you're ice to the touch, movement in complete stillness, consciousness while dreaming. 

And you can feel something for earnest eyes and parched lips when the chemicals triggered by fingertips on skin don't balance out in the end. When all he ever was, was a handful of sensations that don't equate to much; don't equate to enough. 

And who cares now. He was lying, wasn't he.

S. 

{Photo via: We Heart It}

Hidden Meaning.

All things are written in code, crafted by the masters of language. Everything that isn't - the few words of honest nature - get buried inside it all; making it more difficult to decipher anything real. It soon becomes a muddled stream of partially coherent verbs and nouns and adjectives. 

But what did you expect? 

That it would be simple?

Well it is. When you cut out the excess, bit by bit, you see what the puzzles always form to say. :

Everything. Means. Nothing.

I'm sorry this is not what you wanted.
But what did you expect?

S. 

{Photo: Flickr Frederica Erra}

I think I might know --

The snow is building up around me these days in a way that would be alarming in another world. A world I lived in a few short months ago, where snow came only as special occasion, accompanied with some degree of awe.

Now, I stand unamazed and unfazed by this phenomenon. Getting buried under the inevitable without raising an eyebrow. Settling into a new commonplace, rather than embracing it with previous childlike wonderment. 

And I feel like this may be some sort of metaphor, for my life currently - and I have some ideas towards its meaning - but I can't be bothered to work out the details.

I only know I've come to forgive you for everything you couldn't possibly apologize for; and that my anger has subsided into a dull 
hollowness that echoes slightly 
when I stand too near the edge.

No, I don't think you should be worried, yet.

S. 

{Photo via: We Heart It}

What I've Become.

Please let me go as unscarred as possible.

I do want to see you. I do. With everything I'm made of, but I know that would damage me. Deeply. So I'm left to choose the weaker path, of running. Of hiding my weary, dirt-streaked, bruise-stained body behind lies of dead cell phone batteries and strict nightly curfews; I choose to never face you again.

And I like to tell myself I'm brave anyways. At least I'm escaping, I say. But it's no good. I know what a coward I am, and I despise my weaknesses.

I know if I saw you, one last time, just the two of us, it would all appear. A mess of confessions and confusions and anger and pain, and a horror worse still: desire.

So I will hide away until I can leave this place for always. This time I won't turn around; I won't stare back at you as drops race each other across the pane, wondering on what ifs; I will not ready myself for some glorious return. Because I know now that there will never be one. I won't think on your life, at all, any longer. I'm really leaving. 

I just have to make it out alive.

S.

{Photo via: We Heart It}

It's Complicated.

There are a few things you told me that keep spinning in my head.

Some words hit me with tidal wave force and searing pain, leaving me breathless on impact. Wounds reopened, tender at the touch.

And others, said in whisper, remain as such. A quiet voice, coming in-and-out with each breath. I listen through the silence, and hear them play their soft and subtle tune, and wonder at their meaning. These leave a wound of their own; though I know not intended. I suspect you have yet to guess their weight.
I'm broken in half now, and I know there's something beautiful about that. That incomprehensible beauty that comes with being completely torn down: the rawness. Vulnerability. But the feelings hold no glamour, as artistic as the fallen human paints itself. There is no glory in this state of living, only the alluring idea of authenticity that accompanies the shattered soul. And that is not who I am.

Oh, my heart hurts something fierce these days.

S.

{Photo via: We Heart It}

Choose Love.

In light of this situation, in light of this life, I think it best that we stop and recall the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,

begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes: Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

I see no good in wishing ill on someone, for that only traps us in our own cycle of hate and darkness. Remember that light and love are the only weapons we have to drive out the blackness that surrounds us; and indeed, that is what we should long for.

Choose love, dear friends, above hate or bitterness or anger. Choose it so that it can become part of your character. Choose it when you are wronged, and when it it the furthest from instinct. Choose it, because it is our only hope now: it is our doorway to forgiveness, and through that door we will find freedom and joy renewed.

I am sorry for everything that has happened; but remember that more pain will neither reverse nor erase the pain already felt. Remember that you have a choice, and then choose love.

S.

Sometimes The Rain Is Beautiful

People love to complain.

I am not exempt from that statement.

My own internal complaints made me realize, again, how true it is.

"Life was so much easier back when -"

No. Life is easier now than it will be later,

when we'll have bills to pay, mouths to feed,

and people we'll have to answer to.

"If only I had - "

No. If only I would -

stand up off the couch and live

and love and follow my heart,

and move on from the past into a bright

and promising future.

"It's their fault -"

No. It's my fault for being hung up on it,

and for not taking responsibilty for my

own actions.

I felt the need to check myself today, as I was heading

down the oh-so-familiar road towards a pity party.

Sometimes we all need to give our heads a shake, and remember,

our lives are always better than someone else's out there.

Give thanks.

S