Walls closing in. Your head speaks too loud and all you want is a way to escape. Is it romace? Is it novels? If John Green ever wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons you would be the main character. A physical embodiement of teenage depression. Maybe one day life won't be as bad as it seems.

“I still remember the first time I saw you. It in was second grade during recess. You were wearing a pink polka-dress with ladybug hair ties for your pigtails. You were in the sand box, making sandcastles with a red bucket for your sand princesses. It was adorable. I wanted you to notice me. So I stole your red bucket and you hated me for the rest of elementary school. We were so dumb and naive back then. I miss it.

“I was given a second chance back in Ms. Miller’s class in fifth grade. I was assigned next to you in the back row. I would occasionally glance at you, only to snap my head away whenever you looked over at me. Ms. Muller always yelled at me for not paying enough attention. I never minded that.

“Throughout all of middle school, I was just subconsciously drawn to you. I was drawn to your newly dyed pink hair, your sunny smile, your vanilla perfume. I was entranced by you.

“I even became a cheerleader for you. A male cheerleader in middle school. Boy, was that rough. But I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to be near you. Every time we took the bus to a competition, I would always sit beside you. I even convinced all the other girls to leave an open seat beside you. They thought it was adorable.

“When the eighth grade talent show came around, I just wanted to impress you. I had decided to do a comedy act, something to make you laugh. And I was all set to perform it until about a week before the show, when you came up to me bawling your eyes out. Your best friend had just bailed on your dance routine and you had no one to perform with you. Instantly, I agreed to be your new partner and learned the routine you spent a month perfecting in one week. I’m pretty sure I was the only eight grader in the world that learned the salsa in a week. We didn’t win any prizes, but I was just happy to dance with you. After the show, I told you my comedy routine and you laughed and forgot about the whole thing. I loved seeing you smile.

“Then, we reached high school. We were always friends, casual acquaintances, but I think I wanted more than that. I doubt you even remember this, but back in Mr. Machi’s IB English class in senior year, I once dropped my pencil. You reached over and when you handed it back to me, our hands touched for just a second. My face immediately went red and I turned away. That was the moment I realized I was in love with you. I was always in love with you. Since the moment I saw you.

“Kind of late there, I know. I wasn’t that smart, but you made me want to be better.

“From there, I new I had to tell you. Before it was too late, before graduation and I never get to see you again. With the help of Buddy—you remember Buddy? My best friend at the time—I had created the biggest, most dramatic, way to ask you out.

“Here was the plan: during graduation, I had convinced the principal to let me give a speech even though I wasn’t one of the brightest students. During the speech, I planned to give a whole lecture about how high school was miserable and hell—like every student knows—but you made it worth it. Then I would ask you out in front of everyone and then the marching band was going to start playing when you said yes. I was so sure you were going to say yes. But you didn’t.

“I did! The day before graduation you asked me out and my jaw dropped to the floor. I was in awe that you liked me back with that sly smile on your lips and that cute way you play with your hair. I was in so much shock that I literally stood there for five minutes with my mouth gaped open.

“But you stuck around and waited for my answer which was—of course—a yes. That’s when we started dating.

“Unfortunately, we had applied to different colleges because you were going to be an english teacher and I was going to be an environmental engineer However, we tried to make the long distance work. We visited each other on weekends and called every day. I would write you love poems and mail them for that ‘traditional’ love feel. You would mail back a copy with corrections and big smiley faces over everything you loved about it—there were a lot of smiley faces. You always kept the originals. Your roommate was noisy so you hide them in a birch jewelry box I gave you for your birthday. You kept that box and those poems for the rest of your life. I kept the corrections and the smiley faces.

“Sophomore year of college rolled around and I couldn’t stand not being with you. As a surprise, I transferred to your college in September, but you were weren’t there. Instead, you had transferred to my college as a surprise. We both got a good laugh out of that one before deciding on a new college that was perfect for both of us.

“Senior year eventually came and went. It was time for graduation. I had decided that I wanted to ask you to marry me so we wouldn’t lose each other in the real world. I tried to convince the dean to let me give a speech at graduation to redo my original plan. I still thought it was a real winner and would be nostalgic, but he didn’t let me. Instead, I made a reservation at your restaurant in town and would do things the classic way.

“At graduation, I found out why the dean didn’t let me give a speech—because you had already asked him. First, you talked about college, that was the requirement. Then about me. How you joined cheerleading in middle school to gain my attention because all the boys loved the cheerleaders. You were ecstatic when I joined and asked all the other girls to leave the seat next to you open on every field trip. Then, you made up some story about your friend leaving you in the talent show so you could perform with me. Next, in highschool, you purposefully touched your hand to mine. You wanted me to notice you and thought I was as dense as a brick. Which is why you were the one to ask me out.

“And now you were there, on stage, completing my original plan. Even though you were proposing, you had this sly smile on your face, like you already knew my answer would be yes; because it was.

“We got married the following summer. A June wedding, like you always wanted. We both found jobs in our respective professions that we loved. We settled into this world together, finding out places at each other’s side. Until finally, we decided that we were ready to have kids.

“A pair of twins! They filled my heart with joy. We named the boy after your father and the girl after my mother. Together we watched them grow and we grew together. Like a symbiotic relationship between flowers and bees. I need your very presence for survival. And you told me you needed mine.

“You told me you loved me. And I loved you.

“There was nothing special about our love. There are over six thousand weddings every day in the United States alone with people who love each other like we do. But you made it special.

“Even now, staring at your grave, talking to you in the great beyond. Nothing has changed. I still love you. I will always love you. My one and only, Meredith.”

I stood up and gazed at the setting horizon. “I’ll see you again next Sunday.”

The world we share

It’s more than butterflies

More than knotted stomachs

Sideways glances and

Deep romantic kisses

Our world is open arms

Forgiveness and

Commitment

The kind of love

The world envies

Because it cannot be destroyed

Where ‘I don’t like you’

Isn’t the end

But a moment

In our timeline

A time when

We remembered

That love was more

Than just attraction

That we were and are

Stronger than the infatuation

We are accused of

My middle finger

Facing the world

As I stand beside you

Ready for forever

#love #romance #poetry #freeverse

It all starts with one question: Why have I never had a boyfriend?

The answer is simple but the reasoning will take you to different aspects of my life that I never intended to share with anyone. But since I have no name and no face here, I guess for the first time, I'm not afraid.

I am terrified of intimacy. Not because of trust issues, not because of bad experiences. But because of who I am physically. I hate my body. Not in the way you would think though.

I have a condition called hyperhidrosis. It makes my hands and feet sweat all the time for no reason. Sometimes it affects other parts of my body too but I'd say those two have taken the biggest toll on me. I've seen how disgusted people are when I touch them. It's a terrible feeling, but I have to play it off. I don't ever want to love someone and have them look at me the way I've been looked at. That would hurt too much and I don't know what I'd do if that ever happened to me. I want to be able to hold the person I love. I want to feel comfortable being close to them. But I don't know if I'll be able to do that.

This one physical defect has taken a negative toll on the way I view myself mentally. As soon as I catch myself developing interest in someone I cut it off. I don't allow myself to feel because it would hurt too much to be exposed in that way and know that I disgust someone I hold so dear. Even if I get treatment, even if I never sweat again, I don't know if I could ever feel normal. It's just a part of me that I don't know how to leave behind.

All I want, even more than to just be normal, is for someone to accept me, to not tell me how to fix myself but just accept me and love me whether I'm like everyone else or not.

#fear #of #intimacy #hyperhidrosis #love #relationships

I’m not sure what any of us are supposed to be doing, and with these drones in our back pockets and screens being meticulously superglued to every surface, the world feels too loud and too demanding. No one seems to have noticed their hours and attention have been getting sold on street corners for less change than you’d find at the bottom of my purse. They tell us to follow our dreams, but if they don’t fit into an eight hour shift or biweekly paycheck, the adults smile sweetly at us like we’ve said something cute, and say okay but what’s your real plan?

They make us confess our desires, putting tubes down our throats and pumping our stomachs dry until they know they’ve hollowed out every last outlying ambition, until they’ve made us into cookie cutter children, ready to fill out cookie cutter applications and live out cookie cutter lives.

My minds digging through history trying to figure out where we went wrong. I feel like at some point, being great- being more, was a good thing. I’ve been asking around, trying to figure out what the end goal is here, but there doesn’t seem to be a consistent answer. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone actually knows. One man told me it was all about finding myself, and another told me knowledge is the banquet of this life. I’ve had some say it’s about family, or hard work, or travel. A good chunk seem to think its about appeasing the man in the clouds, so they can go live there too. But every answer leaves me with more urgent questions. Why?

Whywhywhywhywhy? why.why.why. I need to know

No one can get more than a couple questions deep before they’ve found themselves confused as well, shifted from their comfortable feeling of knowing. I nudge them until they’re screaming questions at the sky with me (we need to know!), until they’ve joined me in running through the streets, asking everyone in sight. How long until someone chuckles at our restless searching, and calming bestows us with The Answer. Or how long until there’s no one calm left. How long until we’re all left screaming?