Love is not an emotion you feel. It is a relationship you maintain. Every moment, you may choose to act on a bond that exists between you and a subject of your love, or to not; you can choose to be loving or not in the same way you can choose whether to in this moment be running, or hiding, or working, or playing, or helping, or harming. When you show someone they are seen, when you treat another as an equal, when you delight in their complexity, when you include someone in your plans for the future, when you give comfort and permit yourself to accept comfort, these are love. To be loved, then, is to be seen, included, inquired, comforted, and trusted in ways which are open, persistent, and intentional.

This is why so many emotions are tangled up in love. It is a way of living among others, and life is full of emotions. It is also why it is so dangerous to be without it. To be unloved is to be categorically misunderstood, unincluded, and untrusted. That pain is real, and that pain is important.

Please take the time to love. Please practice love to and for yourself. Especially when it is difficult, especially when it seems pointless, especially when it would be easier to harm yourself in whatever creative way you can. When no one else will love you, love you.

i. bloodlust:

i want to hunt boys like men hunt me when my legs and teeth are bared, i’m tired of being an empty body because it’s always the hollow ghosts who end up with their lungs coughed up on the ground, blood-smeared / blood-spattered, i don’t know how to tell people that some nights i dream of a tongue down my throat but most nights i dream of a KNIFE there instead.

ii. faulty wires:

let’s say that text messages are the new love letters so dead silence for two days actually means, “i wanna kiss you so bad i don’t even know how to talk to you anymore.” it goes like this: touch/electricity/delete (and pretend we never actually existed at the same time in the same space; this way the laws of physics hurts a little less). tell me, are you a dying star? DO YOU KNOW HOW TO BLEED?

iii. hearts and paper cuts:

black skies and cigarette smoke tell me to stop writing the world as a nightmare but that’s hard to do when i’ve only known lovers as shadows on my bedroom walls at midnight; i ache/i hunger/i fall for the moon again and pretend that she’s the sun in my mouth. HYPOTHESIS: if i set fire to the world tonight we could burn down to the ground or we could go up in smoke.

iv. god’s liquor-dipped tongue:

heaven is a sweet-talker, an angel taught me how to kiss and tell and fall in and out of love in the time it takes sobriety to kick in and now i can’t think of a better way to say that the universe belongs in hell the same way Lucifer did. i want to CRASH and BURN like Icarus but i’ll be honest and say that i’m sick and tired of hearing about boys who never did learn how to fly.

v. neon churches in our bodies:

there’s no difference between the hunter and the hunted, we’re all searching for the same bloody demons in circles again and again and again. i’m always starving for something more (I’M ALWAYS STARVING FOR YOU). can i offer you these ribs, these lungs? i can make myself into something holy. i can be good for you, i swear.

god exists in the boy i dreamt of kissing with his hands around my neck and my fingers at his throat. we are something desperate, bite marks and bruises and stolen liquor burning in our veins like dying stars because we are always dying, always burning, always looking for the next fix and this time it’s his back against the concrete and these prayers between my legs.

god sharpens his teeth into knives and opens up his mouth to devour me and i’m tired of being a good girl. he tastes of regret, i think he is intoxicating so i give away my body and call it a sacrifice in his name. i have never been more devoted and he has never been more holy, we bleed and collapse into each other and the dying star goes out.

Dear,

It would be too easy for me to say I love you but this is something bigger than myself and I’m scared. This is something that keeps me awake at night, something that sings inside my chest like a trapped nightingale, something that makes you feel as if you were standing in the middle of the train tracks and a train is coming and you can feel the earth reverberate with its weight, a herald of what’s to come, the song of a machine except that this one is alive and it’s coming, it’s coming.

It would be too easy for me to take your hand (metaphorically speaking), put it on my chest, and say, this is god, this is magic, this is blood and this is alive. This is you, and all creation myths began with a word, a gesture.

It would be harder to paint the night sky for you, to find the words that could only roughly describe my feelings for you, to open the Schroedinger’s box of mystery.

- How do souls touch? I keep calling you dear but I would have preferred beloved, because you would be loved.

in addition to the fact that people just have different natural rhythms, a big reason why we can’t seem to go to bed as early as we “should” is that nighttime is, for many of us, our safest and most fulfilling time of day. we don’t have to work, we won’t be contacted by bosses or insurance companies or collection agencies or other suffocating life business… we’re likely only to be contacted by our friends, or by no one at all. night time is release; it’s ours. we can rest or recreate. we can do things we actually want to do. who would choose to cut that short?? just to usher in the next morning when our lives are not our own again? nighttime is precious and nothing could be more normal than the desire to embrace this

i am so soft i will become the shape of your hands when you hold me. please slip me on when you are cold to remind me that my warmth is a necessity, not a burden. when the skin on my thighs bruise, please tell me that purple, then blue, then green, then yellow is your favorite color. please remind me that when the weeks change, i change with them and it is okay if sometimes i flip like a calendar page. i want to hear about the scary movies you watched as a child and i want to know if they still keep you up at night. i have a feeling that you no longer believe in monsters after being called one so often and never understanding why when you looked in the mirror. i am supple and malleable and all too fragile, a glass figurine trying to fall in love with the fucking bull. my mother tucked me into bed at night with stories of how you would eventually break my heart and i kicked off the sheets to make room

i. there is a rage inside me i cannot tame, and everyone keeps quiet about their own. thank you, silence, for teaching us about burden. thank you for giving the air a voice. thank you for the rage.

ii. there are places i can give my darkness to, and rooms with locks i can trick my demons into entering. when i’m feeling sane enough you can find me smeared in tiny block letters on a static screen, and when i’m not so sane, i pelt out sobs like lyrics to my favorite song, and wait until the walls start feeling. thank you, madness, for my art, for my destruction. thank you for ruining me. thank you for your soul.

iii. envy. aspiration. envy. goal. envy. dream. envy. i know the color of corrosion and poison and toxicity well. my insides are splattered with it. i know the taste like bad medicine, i drink it every day. i know it like a mantra. this is how the chemicals work: they eat you from the inside out until you are nothing but a haunted ghost looking for redemption in all the wrong places. thank you, envy, and more so your brattier little sibling, jealousy, for turning us against each other, for turning me against myself, so that now i know the cure is love and a little rebellion.

You were last seen walking through a field of pianos. No. A museum of mouths. In the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. No. Eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. Last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. You were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. I was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. The library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. The cookie with two fortunes. The one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. The beggar. Hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. The phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. The good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. When you play my videos I throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes I watch myself letting you go — lost to the other side of an elevator — your face switching to someone else’s with the swish of a geisha’s fan. My father could have been a travelling salesman. I could have been born on any doorstep. There are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. Meet me on the boardwalk. I’ll be sure to wear my eyes. Do not forget your face. I could never.

i want to say that i think “shooting stars” when i think of us. a dream come true, heat & something cataclysmic – a supernova, like, when you touched my bare skin & i kissed you for the first time & the walls came down & the world around us exploded. lesson number one: a supernova is the death of a massive star, by which i mean to say, i had a little light left in me & you blew it into the outer edges of the universe – or perhaps you were the light, always moving too quick for me to keep up (300, 000 m/s to be approximate). according to special relativity, conventional matter can only travel so fast, but you’re / unconventional. weird. magnetic, how, einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” (lesson number two) refers to quantum entanglement, by which i mean to say, i’m all caught up in you. we flip back & forth between your hand between my legs & my legs around your waist, this, superposition of states until we collapse into one. waves cascading over the sheets, showers of photons when our fingertips touch. i want to say that in this moment you’re here with me, but heisenberg’s uncertainty principle means i can never quite tell whether you’re here or there or somewhere in between. so lesson number three: there’s always going to be distance between us, by which i mean to say, hubble’s law talks about the expansion of the universe & you are a spectrum of light through a prism, refracted / you fracture me. white rays should split into the rainbow, but we run through glass & all i can see is red. the doppler effect. we’re stretched into infrared heat & want & radiation & this is how they detect celestial bodies; we found stars so bright they turned out to be galactic nuclei over a million miles away / i could feel the galaxy that you are from a million miles away. galaxies are said to contain supermassive black holes. you, make me feel like a black hole & sometimes you consume me with your sun-lips, your stardust hair, your alien-green eyes – lesson number four: a black hole marks the event horizon where gravity is so strong it devours everything in sight, by which i mean to say, all the light has escaped from me. entropy is a degree of disorder, reminiscent of my spaced-out head-space; the second law of thermodynamics states “the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time” so put two of us in a room together & the mess becomes catastrophic. we can’t observe the entropy of black holes, but watch them spinning like my head when you grab my hips, & the particles that go flying are the next best thing, which leads me to lesson number five: every particle has an equal & opposite antiparticle. sometimes, particle meets antiparticle & the two annihilate each other, & sometimes, boy meets girl & the particles are just a way of saying: dear t, you annihilate me. [footnote: multiverse theory suggests that every black hole or every quantum observation leads to a parallel universe, so here’s one: another life, where we meet again & pick up where we left off. in this world, we don’t end things before they’ve begun.]

i’m a ghost story with bones

out of ashes / onto the earth

newborn, shaky-limbed

looking for something to tear open

with my teeth

song you never sing because

you fear / i am too beautiful

even in death, especially

in afterlife, for i’ve touched heaven

and returned

howling.