i was so in love with you, so annihilated by you.

your puffy lips and dark eyes and frequent laugh. every single thing about you. it was tragic, the amount of power you had over me.

and i wonder if you knew, you could have asked me to kiss you, to kill you, to do just about anything for you, and i would’ve.

now i really hope you find someone who annihilates you, and who you annihilate back. because you deserve to meet someone who would die for you and love you the way i supposedly couldn’t. they should love you not because you’re just attractive, but because they’ll die without you. because they need to be annihilated by you. and you need them just as much. i hope you fall head over heals for someone who falls head over heals for you too, and don’t look back.

i'm a writer.

i'm addicted to plot twists and clashing metaphors and the arc of a character. i'd follow the path to the ends of hell or the start of heaven. prose and poems are my oxygen and i exhale cliches and inter monologues. and it's easy. it's so easy to drown in ficitonal worlds, in the endless possibilities. to create and create and get lost and neevr look back. it's like breathing, falling in love, crying. staying away results in needing more.

but simply, i'm a writer.

She was small, but strong, quiet, but powerful.

Not book smart,

but street smart and agile.

She was a fighter.

She had a bubbly personality.

I'm sorry for being mean to you during camp,

it really takes two hands to clap,

so it was both our faults,

definitely mine for whacking you with my pedal on the head...

Love ya kiddo,

thanks for being a quiet but strong support for register 6.

If our story could be written out, your name would undoubtfully be in the title of mine and if I'm lucky, maybe I'd be a single chapter of yours.

You are the catalyst for the shipwreak in my heart, the reason why I still run track, and keep me wondering about all the possibilities we missed. The climax, and the cause of conflict. To you, I was probably a game. On the off chance I wasn't, I was just a fling. It's such a shame to me our stories don't line up, but that wasn't all my choice. You stole the spotlight in mine and I know you don't plan on giving it back. Sad thing is, I don't think I could take it back from you. Despite the fact you don't deserve it, you seem to be the protangonist in your story, and in mine.

She should've been illegal. It should be illegal to be like that.

Devastatingly alluring and wholesome, kind and unknowingly ruining me.

Because now I'm numb, I can't hear nails on a chalkboard, or feel the scratches when I fall, and it's worse. It's worse than the heartbreak. Because hearing her cry, or hearing him laugh, it's all the same now. She took my ability to feel. I used up all my joy when she joked around with me, and all my sadness when she decided I wasn't what she wanted. I gave her my sarcasm, my ecstasy, all my wretched pain, and it still wasn't enough. And now the numbness is pouring into the rest of my life. Pouring into her drawings, all my music, all my now non-existant feelings. Now, I can't feel because of her. And that should be illegal.

*

I’ve got a philosphy.

That if you saw the side of people, like how they laugh at campfires, how they dance when you can’t see them, and how passionate they are for that one artist, or sport, or idea, then there is a possibility you could fall in love with them.

And some people do fall in love, or a little more, and some don’t at all.

There is no guarantee, but there is a possibility nevertheless.

She had the stars in her teeth. It was like they were harvested from our universe and melded into her smile. And few had fallen onto her hair, into her blinking, startling eyes, and one to many in her laugh. But they were so evident in her smile.

People never really said her smile lit up the room, she was a reserved girl. But when she laughed unconfined at a joke or gushed over her ideas for the future with me, it was just that much brighter. Like sparks and fireflys and neon drive by signs. Like the center of a burning candle and the dying comet we saw that humid night on her roof right before she kissed me. Yes, it was beautiful and gorgeous and pretty, but that wasn't the way to describe it. Her smile was illegally otherwordly. It was like the stars.

(I tried going for more intense metaphors, something more heavy, any thoughts or advice y'all?)

----

her soul's like lighting,

her blood is blazing fire.

and she deserves more.

like dragons, and cliffs.

endless adventure and books.

open skies and hope.

neverending love.

she deserves all the small things,

the soul with lightning.

----

kinder than sugar,

driven to the moon and back,

thank you very much :)

----

the wholesome people.

who make me smile a lot (unknowingly),

y'all deserve shoutouts.

----

writing's in their blood,

and their words are inspiring.

it's captivating.

----

the people of dreams,

who craft stories from thin air.

are here, you and me.

----

It’s June. Or December. Time doesn’t really matter anymore after you stop working--days and months are simplified to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Plain granola crumbs, brown salad, cheap overcooked chicken.

I emerge outside. The weather is hot, or maybe cold. Either way, I’m pale, malnourished. During the many months of quarantine, I manage to graduate college online. Virtual graduation. I throw my fake hat up in the air and the Dean shakes my digitalized hand, squirting a glob of hand sanitizer as he moves on to the next video caller.

I don’t have a job--perhaps I won’t have one for years. I emerge outside, in the tentatively buzzing city, as someone who will need to beg for someone else’s job. On my hands and on my knees. I’ll be wearing gloves and knee pads, obviously. The guy telling me no will wear a mask, and I will pretend that I didn’t understand him. Thank you, I will say. I really needed this.

My college girlfriend breaks up with me. Frankly, it is straight out of nowhere. She is quarantined in her apartment and I am quarantined in mine and we Facetime constantly, repeating to ourselves that we are stronger than the virus. “I’ve never wanted you so badly,” I remember saying.

A long pause.

“I think,” she says, “I’m learning to live without you.”

I know that most college relationships are destined to end, but it’s supposed to be messy, drawn out; someone moving to the other side of the country, an affair, a secret-- not a clinically clean cut. I drive to her apartment at two in the morning during quarantine and she refuses to let me in. It isn’t safe. I could be infected, or maybe she is. Perhaps she is afraid that we would both get sick, unable to care for one another. Dying together, apart.

I emerge outside, and the streets are clean, not out of love, but out of fear. Nature is beautiful; the parks are exactly the same. Someone had maintained the bushes, the wild grass. Roaming about, I visit the cemetery. I feel bigger than usual, painfully aware of every step I take.

My grandmother is dead, years ago from cancer, before the pandemic. I kneel at her tombstone which is cleaner than anything else on earth and find myself afraid to touch it. Who else might have touched her grave? What horrible bacteria is stuck to the engravements of her name?

I leave after an hour, ashamed. It’s raining. Or maybe it’s snowing. I have no idea the month, the season, or the year. If I should be carrying an umbrella or wearing a parka. Only people with jobs and girlfriends and grandmothers are capable of keeping track of these things. I am unprepared for the weather. My body is naked in my unknowing. I have no control, yet in a way, nothing has control over me. It is a maddening feeling. I emerge outside, in the clean streets of the city, and search for the things that can control me.