origins .

The idea of staying never occurred to me. Not in any serious sort of way.
I was raised on an island but I was not born on one. You were. 

The idea of leaving comes to you in a romantic sort of way. 
A "maybe-someday" that you poke at when things get dull. 
It never came to you as it did me: as a necessity. As a very act of survival. 

We are two different species, I'm coming to understand. 
I killed myself loving you, and it's taken me years to realize that we do not breathe the same. 
To realize that when you say "home" you think of one place and not thousands.
To realize that I can love you in spite of this, but it will kill me. 

You have built your life in small things. 
You let an ocean you can swim become a barrier. You let mountains you can climb fence you in.
And it's taken me a while but I think I understand why, when I left, you didn't do the same. 

You were born on an island, and I was not.  

S. 

{Photo: Tamara Lichtenstein Photography}

Creation .

I am made of dirt-caked carrots from the backyard garden, 

            of scars that I can live with.

I am made of classic rock 

            on roadtrips with an old man. 

From the oceans push and pull, 

            missed curfews and long goodbyes. 

I am made of real maple syrup and Sunday comics, 

            of slammed doors and inaudible apologies.  

      

I am made from skinning-dipping in early May 
            with a boy who 'wasn’t right for me' 

                                               (he wasn’t). 

I am made of packed bags and packed houses, 

            and the restlessness that comes with staying now.  

From a phone call made across the world 

            that has bittered the taste of everything I’ve since known. 

I am made from still moments and negative space, 

            from the sound of steady breathing in a single bed for two. 

I am made of words that someone else has penned, 

            when no one knows me like a stranger. 

S.

{Photo: Melissa Lunar Flickr}

Astrocytoma .

Iridescent and belonging to all the light  

            of the constellations, 

This was how she used to be –   

            a luminescent contrast to the greytones. 

But there are chemicals taking her now 

            capturing the luster of youth and  

coating her body with a blankness:

            A canvas untouched, 

                                or since faded. 

Her mother remembers her as a flame 

            There’s nothing wrong with being still 

                        she tells herself, 

But she remembers when her girl would leap 

            with all the energy of the sun. 

There is heaviness layered behind 

            pale green eyes 

That sprung up somewhere between 

            test tubes and CAT scans and negative results. 

She can’t fix this. No one is fixing this. 

There is a fault in the framework – 

            they’ve found the problem but not the answers 

So what’s the point in all the dim rooms and 

            holding tight to words like ‘hope’ 

                        if everything perfect fucking dies? 

S. 

{Photo: Jacob Sutton Photography}

new territory .

you are a country i want to learn. a culture i want to bathe in until my fingers prune up. i want to carve your language into my walls until they've been chiseled so deep they have nothing left to do but crumble.

you don't scare me with your history. with the wars that have already been fought and lost upon your ground, leaving you scarred beneath the wreckage. i don't mind the mess.

i want to discover the secret places. the ones the ten-day tourists never find. i want to know your safe areas and the ones i'm not supposed to go to after dark has fallen.

i don't want to just visit. i want to live in you. to walk every day with your air in my lungs. to search you over without a map because i will make my own. i will rewrite it a thousand times and i still won't get it perfect, but it will be my life work to try.

i want you to be the last country i go to, and me the last traveler you allow within.

i want to find my home in you.

S. 

{Photo: Margaret Durow Photography}

claustrophobia .

I never had a problem with tight spaces until I met you. You made my life so goddamn unbreathable. You, with your phone calls and your line of questions. You fired them at me and I didn't have a chance. You placed me in front of my grave and BAM BAM BAM, I'm down, buried under everything I never got to answer because you knew. You already knew. You thought you knew, so you buried me. But you didn't know. And now I'm underground, closed in by particles and dirt, and it's not unlike being with you, because you were like that, so close that I couldn't breathe. So maybe suffocating here is better than in your arms but I don't think so. I think you made yourself insufferable, I think you got so near because you wanted to drive me away, and I think you left me before you let me speak because you did know. You knew, but you needed to pretend that it was me not you who couldn't stand small places. And the thing is that I could, until you shot me down and I got trapped under the weight of everything but your lips. Because I could live with phone calls and lines of questions. It was when they left that I fell into this pit. 

S. 

{Photo: Tamara Lichtenstein Flickr}

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}

not yet .

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home,
beaten,
defeated.
But not as long as I can make stories
out of my heartbreak,
beauty out of my sorrow.

Sylvia Plath

{Photo: Tamara Lichtenstein Flickr} 

my ghost .

I was there when you taught yourself guitar - I listened through basic chords and tireless picking until you got it right. I would climb up after you in the giant tree behind your house - we'd kick at the moss and track the sun through the sky. I answered every time you called in the middle of the night - turning up the radio so my parents couldn't hear. We'd talk for hours, but I can't remember what about. 

I was there when you told me what you did to make it all go away. I cried into my bed that night because you failed, and I couldn't imagine if you hadn't. 

I was the one you called after you broke down. Psychosis. I brought you in a coffee you weren't supposed to have (largewithcreamandsugarplease). I sat with you in white rooms and listened to you explain yourself, but you didn't. 

I came back again, anyways. I brought you coffee again, anyways. 

I came back until one day they told me to stop coming back. You couldn't see me anymore, and I haven't seen you since.

And yet, I still hear your last words, haunting:

"Maybe you have already died. I know I have." 

S.

{Photo: Misshosna Flickr}

day fifty-three.

i've been a little lost. 

the loneliness is palpable in this city. i've brushed past him on subway 5, holding a briefcase but no expression. i've heard them on the street: whistling as the girls pass by. i've seen it in searching eyes, in forced smiles, in the cellphone that never gets put away. 

it's swallowing me. and it is dark and it is terrifying. and i can't quite stand to look it in the face because it is more than i am ready to feel. these are the things they should have prepared us for.

i am trying to find my way. 

S. 

{Photo: Margaret Durow Photography}

art-less.

There was no poetry in our bodies on those nights and early mornings. Only lapses in human judgement and motions that didn't mean all they were supposed to. (I was always loneliest sleeping next to you). 

There was no poetry in anything you said. Just lines recycled from Hollywood scripts. (4/10 on delivery). 

We tried to make poetry out of what was left behind of our souls (after the ones that came before were done with us), but not enough remained.

I have a poem for you now. About freckled skin and hands that quiver in the dark, about you and us and a place I'd never been before. But it is nothing to remember us by. 

(It is a poem and we were not).

S. 

{Photo: Lisa Overdose Flickr}