@5 months ago with 1 note
#spilled ink #poetry #love 

I try so hard to hate the smell of cigarettes. The flick of a lighter is so familiar to my ears, I feel as if I’m going to turn and see you there with your pack of red Capris. I remember your laugh and the crooked smile that worked its way to the edges of your mouth before you could make it to the punch-line of a crude joke. I remember the way your eyes crinkled at the corners and exactly how your hands and mouth moved as you took a drag and then held the cigarette away. I could still smell the smoke.

My friends hold theirs away from me like that, too. They avoid the subject as if the thought will make me crumble like the ash off the end of their stoke. I don’t crumble that easily. 

It wasn’t just the smoking. Mom took me to the ER with her. I had never seen you that sick before, and you were so scared and confused, you wouldn’t take water from the doctors because you thought ‘they’ were after you. I was eleven when I had to rescue my hero. I learned that parents need to be taken care of and that sometimes, heroes wear soccer cleats and finish their homework under the covers with a flashlight. Sometimes they turn down a hug and walk away from your surprised and broken face so that you’ll realize you need to stop fighting mom when she tells you to take your medicine. I still remember exactly how it felt to leave you standing there the first time I wasn’t on your side because I was always on your side. You were my best friend, and you never told me what to think. You taught me how to agree to disagree. Maybe that’s how I hated your habit but supported your right to do it.

When the world was against you, I understood that you needed it to be okay for you to give in. I knew when you were in institutions for months, and then for years without coming home, I couldn’t be mad at you for starting again. You were the one who took me hiking and gave me my love for the outdoors, and I watched the life drain from your body as you spent your days looking at the sky through wire netting and eventually through nursing home windows.

Even looking back I’m all tangled up. I lay ink on a reliable blank page, attempting to sculpt words into some sort of clarity for myself the way I’ve done in the past. I flail in the dark, blindly grabbing memories as they come, fighting with myself for forgiveness. Each time I think I’ve reached the surface with some sort of resolve, I’m shoved underneath again and I’m tired of swimming. 

Heroes agree to disagree. They hold your hand and don’t let you see them cry as you grimace from the pain of the intubator that was never supposed to be put there. They even agree to disagree when you can’t fight anymore. They tell you it’s okay and play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the ukulele in the chair next to your hospital bed, knowing it’s the last time you’ll ever whisper “I love you, sport” from underneath the machine pumping air in and out of your tattered lungs. 

It’s amazing how smell can bring back memories. One waft of cigarette smoke… I can still hear your voice. The thing that took you from us is the thing that brings me back. I try so hard to hate the smell of cigarettes.  

@5 months ago with 1 note
#writing #spilled ink 

That’s what I wrote the night I found out what you did.
The day you took
four and a half years of my trust and my patience,
soiled it
with alochol-soaked lies, laid her down on it and
fucked her where you held me
just the night before.
Held me as silent tears became sobs rolling off my nose and chin
into that same sheet you laid her down on.
You fucked her in my tears.

Looking back I realize those tears weren’t for you at all.

Because if those tears
were for you, I’d still be clinging to a
rub-my-back, i-believe-in-you, long-walks-in-the-middle-of-the-night, you-roll-your-eyes-but-i-still-keep-trying 
photograph,
dirty and fuzzy around the edges from clammy hands and 
crying, “Four and a half years??”

No.

Those tears were for the girl 
I lost when I met you. 
For the girl who let you play with her self-esteem as violently as
little boys are allowed to
play with toy guns and swords while
little girls practice sabotage of their own potential.
Let you toss her self-esteem aside 
once you were bored, while she dutifully cradled yours the way she always learned.
Those tears were for the girl
who gave you 1,000 chances too many and 
still blamed herself for breaking your heart. 
Now is where I would have said thank you for sparing me 
any more bullshit

but I’m tired 
of letting my success and my mother’s and my sister’s
be brushed off the page like eraser dust after trying to rub your name out of my memory.
So I’ll thank myself.
Thank me for finding that girl
and reminding her what real love is supposed to look like.

And if you’re curious to know,
you can find it in the photographs
you left on your wall, in the eyes
of the woman who no longer asks herself to be less. 

@5 months ago
#poetry #spilled ink 

at times i feel as empty and 
blank
as the pages beneath my 
pretty new pen.

the crisp paper begs for
just a peck from its
ballpoint lips,
a taste of ink scrawled thoughtfully into
truth.

i want to dream dreams of
travel
coffeeshops and open mic
meeting strangers
falling in love

dreams held behind the 
cap of my pen and 
out of reach by learned habits of
paying rent
independence and 
wishes that never came true.  

a wish to know how to swim will never 
come true if you don’t
jump in. 

@5 months ago with 1 note
#poetry #spilled ink