on sweet spices and bitter words

March 30, 2014.

I am surprised at how clear this was since the very beginning. I did wrong to forget.


1.
We came together
though I like to pretend it was his doing and not mine.
Sometimes, when I'm quiet and quite sure I'm alone,
I know I lead him there.

2.

He thinks of love as kissing and holding and fucking me,

I think of love as someone who listens,

I think, but I don't really know.

3.

I wonder if loving him makes me a terrible person.

He thinks that loving me makes him better.

I am secretly proud of him,

like a bad scrape gotten as I fixed the roof by myself.

4.
His carelessness hurts me.
I pretend it doesn't.
This is a lie.

5.
I think I am an escape for him.
He is my choice of venom.

6.
The inescapable truth is that I want to fall in love,
though I know there is little hope for this particular story.

cómo te quiero.

“Te quiero, pero no como ese querer que viene antes de amar, te quiero como quiero ir a París.”

i wanted to delete that cortázar quote but every time i tried, i remembered that whenever i pick up hopscotch (rayuela), i think of you.

poetry is something i turn to when i need answers, or when i can't phrase my questions. i have never been a poet though i have found myself spouting it on more than one occasion. and i keep turning to it now, as if it holds what i have been so tirelessly looking for.

but i am tired, love.

i can never know how i love you. i can never understand how you love me. i can be and un-be at the same time, if such a thing has ever been possible.

because i do love you, with and without all complexities and pride. i love you simply, and intricately, and i love you close and i love you from a distance. i know i love you, even on the days i feel you have forgotten, and especially on the nights where i wish not to love you anymore. i am exhausted, drained. i can feel the love, yes, but with an unmistakable touch of loneliness, and it feels colder than what they told me love looks like.

i think about you. constantly. relentlessly.

i love you. constantly. achingly.

i do not miss you, but you, you are missing from me. a part of me i cannot bear to touch whenever you are not near.

fleurs du papier

if i could paint you, i would use all the colours of carnations
the angry slashes of red on a golden morning sky
the sun that sets in the caribbean sea

i would take the stars, draw them in your eyes
in the tip of your tongue
i would stitch your name upon the waves
create monuments of sand, and salt, and words

i would map the constellations on your skin
draw the way from your heart to mine,
throw away the compass

i hold your memory in the palm of my hand,
and you, somewhere between my fingers

i carry your smile in the inseam of my cheek,
a kiss hidden in that place between the darkest point of night and the sounds of our alarms
an i love you, somewhere between kissing you and dreaming i do

if i could paint your smile
the colour of winter come
i would kiss my summers on the tip of your nose
taste spring in the rose of your cheeks

loving you is not a seasonal event
every day i fall, get up,

fall again, harder

but there is no autumn,

no prelude to the cold

it will hit once you are gone

breathing in the light, fantastic

i fell in love between two breaths
the first -- the one you stole when you first kissed me
and you returned it promptly, breathed into me with a smile
i could never forget

the other was more subtle,
clocked between empty airport seats
and the realisation
that i may have missed something important,
and i might be too late.

i took a deep breath
looked straight ahead,
remembered what you looked like when i left

i didn't even tell you i loved you

if there are worse things;

if there are worse things than longing for you, then i am blessed that this is my cross and i bear it so proudly. my days, which have been so empty, are filled almost entirely by your absence. i miss your voice and your laughter, and the way your eyes smiled at the corners whenever i managed to surprise you. i bury these things in pockets i don't have, where my hands cannot reach them afterwards.

i keep your kisses warm, stitched upon my skin.  your words are stapled to the roof of my mouth, your name written on the back of my throat. i can taste all of your excuses when i swallow. i wash it all down with time, teaspoons of nostalgia mixed in. la douleur exquise, they call it.

if there are worse things than longing for you, then i am cursed, for i suffer an affliction to which there is no cure, though there are far more deadly poisons out there. your name, which has brought me such joy, has a sweet taste and a bitter texture. this longing that brings the ocean to my eyes and a crisp taste of autumn in the wake of summer, has your eyes, and your shape.

if there are worse things than longing for you, then i am both blessed and cursed that you have been mine to love, and mine to miss. blessed that i could call you mine; cursed that i am yours, still.

after all is said and done

it's been hard to admit that i miss you.

i have been struggling with it for a while now, since before i knew i would, when i did not believe i could. and now it happened and here i am, and there you are, and we're not the same people who met briefly in a place where we could have been so many others.

how unfair life is, that people should meet under such particular circumstances and find something in someone else they never knew they'd miss. i never knew what i wanted until i had it and it was taken from me, and i never knew just how much i have refrained from giving.

but it's not the missing that kills me. it's the guilt at wishing i could stop, the painful honesty with which you asked why i couldn't simply be there, why couldn't i have been born elsewhere, that we might be together. it hurts, because i can't ask more of you, but i don't know how to stop.

i just don't know how to not want more.

intoxicating substances

i am drunk off you
i am drunk on you
the way your lip twitches when you say my name
the way you taste when i kiss yours

i want to hold your hand
the whole extent of you
i want you to hold me
tight, warm and strong

i want to kiss you,
taste your lips
and my name as it falls from them

i want to be wrapped around you
deeply, so tight that you may forget
where you end and where i begin

i want to love you
hard
fast
ever way
always.