relapse .

you've been seeping back in
spreading through my veins
a sickness

first in dreams
then in faces i let myself forget
                         
then calls, too blurry-eyed to see the screen
           yet somehow typing out your number
                                                                       muscle memory
old texts dug up from centuries past
a graveyard of memories, excavated — they should be dead
                                                                           but somehow

somehow

it's you again.

you're back.

S.

{Photo: Angela Kim Flickr}

alchemy .

i've found you in the silence

when i'm alone or in a crowd of strangers

i've found myself missing the softness between your calloused hands
& the laughter on your teeth

& i know we were insignificant — 

strangers colliding on our way to bigger things

but i think you dropped your pen — 

something small and insignificant

& i think i picked it up

& after all this time it's turned to gold in my pocket —
heavy and significant

but it's yours not mine —

all too heavy for my two arms to carry

something bigger

than we were

so that i've found i'm now missing your blackberry sweet kisses

& the sound of your voice first thing in the morning

before either of us had opened our eyes

saying not now not now not now to the early-light
& right now right now right now to me

& i'm sure you left these moments in that
apartment next to mine

before leaving that old town for good

but i brought a button home with me
that turned into a diamond in my suitcase

& i can't seem to let it go.

S.

{Photo: Lily Little Flickr} 

wreckage .

when he found me i was a pile of bones and embers and broken words
a kaleidoscope mess
who said yes to things that made me sad.

i let him tear out pieces of me and
wear them
i watched him parade them around like a trophy
that he had won —
conquered.

and i found that when i went to
pull myself back into something i could recognize
i was missing some important bones
to stand on
to reach
to run.

i found my embers did not reignite
because he had stolen the ones
that still glowed
and left me the ashes.

and i found that the shards of words and promises
that once made up my soul
no longer fit together like they should
no longer held meaning —
pages of my favourite book ripped out and
tossed to the wind.

and i hated him
for a long time.

hated him for coming to me when i was weak
for taking what wasn't his
for sitting on my chest until i couldn't breathe anything but him.

but i have learned
that i still
can dance on broken bones,
that there are parts of me that will catch fire
even when i'm most numb,
that i was born with a pen at my fingertips
and i could re-write every last word that i lost
or i can leave the torn and crumpled papers where they are
and write a new part.

S.

{Photo: MillyCope Flickr}

hollow .

it's hard to believe (no it isn't) how easily I fit back into your hand.
how our voices dance back and forth again -
as if the choreography never stopped (i'm not sure it did).
our months of silence melting into the last time i saw you
until there was no silence, only a desperate goodbye to hello-again
one after the other.

your presence somehow cancelling out
everything that came between:
the chill of winter seeping into spring, summer, fall,
the bitterness that bled into my bones,
the side of the bed that i named loneliness (after you).

there are some things that i know in life (things that you taught me):
i know that though we work in theory
we will never work in practice
i know the clock is never on our side
i know the way the world ends is not with a bang but a whimper
(eliot warned but you showed).

but for just one day - today - lets pretend that all it takes for us to be
is what we are in this moment
that the force driving us together is stronger than all else
tomorrow we can put miles between our sea salt lips
and forget our dance for silence
but today lets say the world is what we've asked it to be
since the beginning (a place safe enough for both our hearts).

S.

{Photo: Patrycja Dolata Photography}

art .

You're trapped somewhere between my longing and forgetting
A half-memory, half-god
An exhausting mix of emotions
That never tire of being felt.

I am a dwarf to the lie of you
An abandoned painting in an abandoned home in a dirt-road town
While you are Michelangelo's David.
Unforgotten through the eras.

But you don't exist in real time -
In solid proof between my fingers.
Just in half sketched drawings
And conversations recalled in so many different ways they might not have happened at all.

I think, more than having you,
I need to shrink you down into a manageable size.
Because no one ever has to think about
An abandoned painting in an abandoned home in a town 600 miles away.

S.

{Photo: Clara Román 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}

pabst.

The night we drank too much cheap beer and keyed our initials onto a cheap bar room table, 
well, 
it turns out it was magic. 

It's just taken me all this time to understand.
Too late, of course. 

I missed my cue and then delivered the wrong lines. 
And you took me for what I said, not meant. 
(Naturally). 

[I'm sorry, as always].

S. 

{Photo: Dennis Adelmann Flickr}

The Words On My Lips.

Written By: I Wrote This For You

And when we speak now, seldom as that is, the old language returns. I wonder if it makes old names make guest appearances in your mind. If you can feel the skin of my neck near yours one more time. Do you reach across the bed for a shape, no longer there. Do you remember it clearly or is it all just memories of memories. Is there still warmth from my fingers tracing the contours of your skin, left somewhere in your body. If you smell the smell of how I used to smell in a crowd, do you think of these things. Is something missing in everyone else's or someone new's voice. Will they never know quite how to laugh or breathe just behind your ear. Do they know what you look like when you want to leave a party, when you've had too much of people. Could they rebuild your body out of clay if they needed to, because they've touched it so many times. Does your back still arch the way it used to when I still kissed you. 

Does an old singer sing an old song on an old radio. 

Do the lyrics still shake your fucking soul. 

Did it sound like this?

You were everything I needed, and now all I need is for you to remember.

S. 

{Photo via: We Heart It}

The Broken Years.

I dare say I still reach for you through the empty spaces, just to see if you will answer. Of course, you never do. I don't know who to blame for that; or if blame is necessary.

I hardly trust myself to think on those days - irrelevant as they are - for fear that I will somehow alter the details. Dulling or skipping or smudging some small moment that meant something to me then. I don't want to lose it altogether, but the possibility of remembering it wrong seems a greater tragedy.

It isn't you anymore, though. I feel I should tell you this, so you know I'm not entirely lost. No. Not you, but rather, the comfort you brought. The illusion of safety I felt in your arms. The ease by which we existed together. 

It's difficult for me to find that here. By now, I'm nearly a full-time cynic, with little time to count my blessings, trust there's love, or hope for peace. Maybe 19 is too old to still hold on to magic - an age to stop waiting for that miracle, and instead, face the discordant song of reality: "You are alone; the strongest arms let go."

S.

{Photo: Flickr Kelley Smith}

Time Machine.

I shouldn't have done that..

I shouldn't have gone back in time.

I remember so much now; too much. Oh, these are yesterday's feelings.

S.

{Photo: Flickr Mischelle }

Your smile and my dress.

I saw us together and had to smile at

how happy we were and

how right we weren't and

how foolish everyone was
not to see as we did.

Love and friendship are not
as far as some imagine -

no, quite a bit further still.

S.

{Photo: We Heart It}

I can feel home.

I just returned from a weekend in Boston. Boston in the fall.

I can't retell how lovely it was, only to say it was almost as breathtaking and divine and majestic as home. That, of course, was the trouble.

First there were the mountains. Snow capped and beautiful. But that's not what I was waiting for. And when finally I did see what I was after, it took away my speech. The ocean. The glorious ocean. Pulling in late at night, I could see it stretching down the beach for miles, the waves breaking with a fury, the moon as the spotlight. And I could hardly contain my excitement for what the morning would reveal.

Disappointed I was not.

Thinking on it now makes my heart long for it all again. This is the closest I've been to homesick since leaving, because this weekend has been the closest I've been to home. The closest I've been able to relate anything to the lunch hours we snuck down to the beach, or days we hiked to some bright spot, or mornings we woke early to the sunrise. Closest to the crashing waves and boat rides and sea wind.

It was the first time for one girl on this trip. Her first time ever seeing the ocean. And this struck me because I cannot imagine a life without.

A life that never stood out on a jutting rock as the water swelled up, being sprayed with sea mist as the wind blew salty hair into tangles. That never leaned over the dock trying to catch all the white jelly-fish in sight. That never ran in, on a late August night, and watched as the movements made the phosphorescence light up. That never simply sat beside, looking and wondering at everything, because the magnificent expanse could not help but provoke your mind to engage in the beauty and grandeur that lay out beyond you.  

Magic. It has always been. It will always be.

S.

The sounds of loneliness.

It's taking my breath away, the way a song can flood my mind with the past. I'm really drowning. Drowning in the long - frequent - drives, in the late nights spent with you, in all the things that I forgot to say racing through my mind.

I forgot this loneliness, but it's a not a feeling I despise. Instead I let it crawl back to me in its old familiar way. It comes to hold my hand through the cold, grey months. It latches onto my heart and grabs a hold of my mind (again). There is something odd about this feeling - something addicting about the ache it creates in me. I remember it all.

And I welcome it back. Maybe I ought not wish its return, but there is that something about it. That familiarity that I accidentally long for. Maybe I'd rather - sometimes - fall back and drown in an aching comfort than march forward and upward and past it all.

But it sounds ridiculous like that, no? Unambitious, perhaps? Very well, I am stupid and lazy. But it may be said, clearly and soundly, that some of my most fond memories were in that time. They were in the car rides by myself, in the late night visits that ended too late and too soon, in facing some battles by myself, and in the music that surrounded me all the while. So today I reach for that old friend - the dull ache that kept me company when my heart was beyond the reach of human touch. I let it take me again, to a place where I felt many things, and nothing at all.


S.

{Photo: Junkiesky Tumblr}

Remember when..

You brought me to that spot for the second time and told me that you wanted to be my boyfriend and you gave me my very very first kiss. The stars were shining then, and you kept me warm when I started to get chilly. And you waited oh so patiently until I responded.. Two days later. You waited for me a lot.

We jumped into the Quarry on that raining day in May in nothing but our underwear. We had no towels, of course, so instead I drove home with the hot air blasting so my parents wouldn't ask why I was soaked. That day is one of my best memories. I still think about it on rainy days.

We had a picnic on the beach with just a blanket, fishy crackers and some film. It was beautiful.

We would spend days together with no agenda, and just find where that took us. Always to beautiful spots. I miss exploring this little corner of the world with you.

We lay out under the stars for hours, that freezing day in February, making up stories for all the constellations. I wanted that to last forever.

We went to the concert in Victoria. You didn't have your license yet so I had to drive. And it took forever to find a parking spot, and when we were all the way at the door (just in time) I realized I had left my ticket in the car. You walked back with me, and we saw one of the band members standing outside. But I still felt bad the rest of the night. Now I think about how I should have just felt happy to be spending time with you.

You would write me notes and hide them in my textbooks so I would find them in class and have something to smile about.


You took me to Kinsol Tressel and as we were walking back you held my hand for the first time and it just felt so natural.

We found that swing in the forest by my house. I love swings.

You would always hold my bag for me, even if it made you look silly.

I would always try to make you spin me around, because I wanted to be like one of those couples in movies. But you hated it because you thought it made you look silly.

I begged you to get a photo with Santa because I wanted something to put in the Christmas section of the scrapbook I planned to make you for graduation day, but you refused.

You made me cookies and I didn't know they were for me so I accidentally left them on the desk. They were delicious when I finally tried them.

You told me you loved me for the first time and I could never say it back. You never got to see the million times I wanted to but was too afraid.

We went to that movie together but just ended up kissing in the back like a typical teenage couple. That was a silly night. But it was one of my favorites.
We were driving back from Victoria and we stopped at one of the viewpoints and lay out on one of the picnic tables and looked at the stars. Everything was perfect then.

Your hands would always warm up mine. They feel cold a lot now.

You made me my very own yearbook when it didn't look like I would get one. I still can't help smile when I look at it. But it's a sad smile now.

I never wanted you to touch my face or take pictures of me. It was because I was afraid that you having your hands on my face would make you realize it wasn't as pretty as you thought I was, or that you'd get an awful picture and see that I wasn't good enough for you.

I went to your birthday dinner and your mom told embarrassing stories. That day made me so happy. It made me hope that one day I would be able to be comfortable enough to come in to your house and talk with your family any time.

You broke up with me and then brought me out into the pouring rain and kissed me on the lips. I wanted to tell you that I didn't want it to end, but I knew you had already moved on, and I didn't want to hold you back.