pressed petals

It was dark out and we were sitting under the streetlights, stars muddled by their yellowish glow. The neighborhood was silent except for a couple of stray cats trying to find each other. Doubt rushed out through my lips and you were quick to extinguish any sparks that could have caught the hem of our relationship and gone ablaze, destroying all we had in seconds.

There was a spark, though, that caught you off-guard, an ember composed of pain and paranoia that seeped through your skin and your low voice rushed out through your lips.

“No,” you said. “No. It’s you. You’re everything. Nothing else matters.”

Your voice broke on the words, sending forth a wave of emotion neither of us really expected from you, and you leaned in and pressed your forehead to mine as if to somehow crush our minds into one, even though they practically are in the first place. You held me there, pulling me into the warmth and safety that is your embrace, and I happily submerged, hoping never to resurface.

Sometimes your silly words still manage to send a flock of butterflies dancing through me. Three simple words can rip me apart and fix me all at once. Three little words, three precious little words, scrawled across a piece of paper and hidden away in my bookself for me to find when fate thinks I should, waiting for some unspoken reply.

Darling, I really miss you, too.

Yesterday

We spent hours and hours in bed during the day. No one dared venture in. It was as if they could sense us through the door, sense the magic between us, and they left us alone. I thought I could never sleep at home, but the truth is, home is in your arms. Home is the way I can feel you breathe against my back as you hold me close; home is the constant pounding of your heart against mine; home is the glimmer in your eyes, the way I can look into them and just see for miles. See the days we will spend picnicking in our backyard and building blanket forts in the living room, the days we will spend walking beneath the trees with our pinkies looped together, the days we’ll wake up and immediately just smile, like we know all the secrets of this big broad universe but none of them matter at all because we are the universe.

You are a brilliant force of nature, my sweet, and you don’t even know it.

Whoa. I never knew I’d get followers on this. Thank you all so much.

Tonight the weather is perfect. The wind has finally stopped, and the night air is cool and calm and starry. I wanted to build a blanket fort in the living room and then I realized how alone I really am. It wasn’t supposed to be this way: I wasn’t supposed to be the only child. There was another baby dancing around in mom’s stomach when I was three years old. Brian or Shelby, Brian or Shelby, my little angel brother or sister. They’d be fifteen now, going on sixteen, if they’d lived. I would have had someone to build blanket forts with at night, and teach how to paint, and drive to school, and defend when they got picked on, and help them learn to sneak around mom and dad. I’d be sharing my room right now: my little sibling’s bed would be on the other side, and we’d get annoyed at each other and throw pillows and call each other names and try not to wake our parents.

You’re buried outside in the flowering bush outside mom’s window, when you should be sitting right here, breathing, laughing, and living. You should be able to go to school, fall in love, get married, have your own little angel.

You are my little angel, though. I miss you every day.

There are days when the way the sun beats down on the grey concrete that I remember moments with you, when the breeze wafts through the window and makes the curtains flutter and the dreamcatcher shift against the pane and the leaves on the trees only let a golden glow through, when it’s three in the morning on a cold winter night and I’m curled up in blankets with a candle flickering on the oak nightstand by the bed and my hair is tied up and it’s the time of year when my toes are never warm. I’m transported to moments with you, when your eyes glowed at me and your mouth curved up in a grin when I said stupid things for the sole purpose of making you laugh, or when you absentmindedly reached back for my hand as we walked, wanting me beside you, wanting me closer, at your level, even, joined. Those times when conversations die out, I remember the way we could just sit there with only the sound of gentle breathing and be completely content, like mere words wouldn’t live up to the electricity between us, the magic that we felt. And it was magic. It was enchantment and wonder and it was right at our fingertips, always just out of our grasp. We couldn’t see it, but we could feel it, like the turning of the earth when you lay in the grass and squeeze your eyes shut and just wait. You can feel magic if you wait for it. And we waited. We were always waiting.

We’re still waiting.

05.19.10

Sometimes I wish there was a world beneath my blankets where I could hide. Where the only light was dim and flickering and came from the flashlight stolen from beneath the kitchen sink where the spiders stay. I wish I could pull those covers over my head and go back to those days so many years ago when the sun shined brighter and my hair was light as starlight, when I lived wide-eyed and barefoot, when I’d ly in the grass making daisy chains and watch the clouds dissolve in that ocean above. I wish for those starry nights spent holding hands in the parking lots when time didn’t matter and fairy tales were real, when nothing made sense and didn’t have to. And we slept in our jeans and talked all night long, our voices turned to whispers like we were telling precious secrets, sharing souls. And we’d climb up on the rough block walls just to watch the cars go by. These were the days when love was no more complicated than a retro pop song and days were spent scribbling our dreams onto college ruled paper in red ink only to be dubbed as junk and thrown away or left forgotten at the bottom of a box beneath the bed. In those days we talked about growing up and how much fun we were going to have and all the things we were going to do. And we dreamed we’d grow up and finally be beautiful even though we already were. I wish I could disappear into that world, hide away from all the bullshit that builds up as you age, hide away and bathe in the innocence of being a dreamer with only twelve years under my belt when the stars were in my eyes and the world was mine for the taking.

petals

As he held the bloom by it’s thin, hard stem, staring down at the coffin lid and the pile of roses already there, an unclipped thorn pricked his index finger, startling him and causing the rose to fall down into the mud at the bottom of the plot.

He could almost hear her laughing at him.

“Why don’t you read to me, like you would’ve? It could help.”

He smiled gently, blue eyes twinkling in the dim lighting from the lamp on the bedside table. “What book?”

“There’s a big red one on that bookshelf over there.”

The dark-haired man stood, going to the bookshelf and retrieving the only red book, turning it over in his hands. He chuckled.

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales?” he asked. “Your mother read this to you?”

His daughter smiled. “She wanted me to know from the beginning that there were bad things out there.”

“That was probably something I really loved about her, wasn’t it?” he mused, glancing up at the framed family picture of a smiling young couple and their infant daughter that sat on the shelf where the book had been.

“Dad, in all honesty,” the young girl said, looking down at her blankets, “I’m pretty sure you loved everything about her.”

05.18.10

Everything hurts.

It’s like my ribs are pulling apart in my chest, like my heart is pushing and pulling, like it wants to be free, to go out and find him. It’s like the air that pulls in and out of my lungs isn’t enough anymore, like he’s the air that I need, that I’m supposed to inhale and exhale him like precious, life-sustaining oxygen, like carbon and smog and pollution, like all the good and bad of him are everything to me. It’s like I’m supposed to open my eyes and see straight into his, see his soul, dancing and moving along with the wind that overtakes this town day after day after day after day. Everything is pulling me toward him; it’s magnetism, it’s two souls that are just yearning to run off, to run far away and never come back, and never need anything else. To run and leave it all behind.

Sometimes I write letters to him in spiral notebooks with messy cursive. I’ve nowhere to send them. I haven’t the foggiest idea who he is, or where he is, or what he’s like, or the way his face looks when he’s sleeping, or the sound of his voice on the phone or his footsteps on the floor in the middle of the night when the stars are out and we’re the only ones awake. I don’t know the feel of his hair through my fingers, or the way his eyes twinkle when I say the right thing. I haven’t memorized the calluses in his palm or the scars or the facets in his eyes. I don’t know anything about him, just that I love him, already. That I’m supposed to love this one person here on this earth, the only one that is made for me, made to fit me like a lock and key, to unlock everything I hide behind the walls I’ve build around myself, to understand and appreciate what makes me tick the same way I will for him.

I don’t know what makes him laugh or what makes him cry, I don’t know what gets on his nerves or what captivates him, I don’t know what he does when he’s angry or what kind of car he drives or what books he likes to read or if he takes the time to wish on stars like I do. I don’t know if he thinks about me, wonders what I’m like, wonders when we’ll feel that spark, that lightning that makes the clouds open up and the sun pour down on the world, or how he’ll meet me at that perfect place in a strange situation that we’ll laugh at later when we sit on our porch with cups of tea early in the morning when the dew is sparkling against the trees and we need blankets to keep warm. I wonder if he wonders.

Sometimes I think that I can feel his pain or his joy. When I’m sad for no reason, and just want to hide away or go for a long walk by the water and forget the world, I wonder if he feels the same. If, from wherever he is, he has some kind of hold on me—and I on him—that makes me feel what he feels without reason or explanation. Or the days when I’m just smiling and giddy and laughing at nothing, getting weird looks from passersby who have no idea. I wonder about these things.

I know that even if it takes a month or a week or a year or a decade that it will be perfect, even if it takes a while to see it’s beauty. It’ll be abstract art that you have to stare at before your mind picks out the images and the beauty. It’ll be serendipity, and it’ll be beautiful. Or maybe it won’t ever happen at all. Maybe we’re just two people who will never meet, never know each other. Maybe he’s gone from this earth, too soon, too young, and he’s watching over me from the clouds, keeping me safe. I don’t know any of this, but I do know that he’s out there, somewhere.

That’s all I need.