i love the water, but i cannot swim. i cannot simply just swim. i need to become one with the water. let it prune my fingers, absorb through the crevices, let my bones dissolve in the salt, let the sun paint me melanin, and place tumors underneath my skin cells. what a strange tragic way of saying "i love you, but i simply cannot stand being loved by you".
but i'll get over it, i guess. the grief that remained from weeks of bed rotting and weeks of my headphones blasting the fact that we're small and not worth the mention but that perhaps, maybe, we're taller in another dimension. after weeks of grief, the grief of ever loving you, what's left of it is only at best a talent for poetry. that's all that is ever left of any mere human emotion i've ever felt in my life. i am simply the papers that my tears water down and the ink of the pens that constantly run out. and i am two people. i don't expect you to understand what that means. expectations no longer exist when it comes to you. what a poet i have become. with bloody bitten nails and fucked lungs, what a poet you have made me.
and the country is grey or at least the city, i am yet to see the rest of it. the country is grey. blue at times. brown in the trees like your eyes in april mornings and yellow on the streets like the shirt you wear on grocery runs. but it's not like i think about you. you are rarely ever in my head but the coffee i drink before my 8 am classes is always run-down and i never tell the barista to fix his mistakes, it is run down and all it ever does is remind me of you.
so i'll wear your shirts to understand the beat of your heart better and remind myself it doesn't weigh me down. it doesn't weigh me down. it doesn't weigh me down.
and i have all these thoughts that ache to bleed out in front of you. at your doorstep. at 3 am. at any am? but i will set it down for a while.
remind myself that fear was your first response. not the fear of losing me but fear that i may stay. remind myself just how insignificant, just how small, just how unworthy of mention i was to you that night.
and tell you that the thought of you no longer rises bile in my throat. the news of what you say on the staircase in my best friend's ears no longer has me clenching at my chest. tell you i have met a boy. again. hope that this time, i no longer write to you again.
