(old & distorted contortions) of love

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i think i have always grappled with incompleteness. it reveals itself to me inch by insufferable inch yet i can’t stop digging my shoulders deeper, letting it rear its ugly head. so to answer your question no, i don’t think love prays for everyone.

what is it, to go on living after love shows you its second face? i can’t remember a time i wasn’t scorched or that i wasn’t scorching myself — every bitter piece of me flying into the unreliable, exhilarating hands of the lover. how can i learn to love the right way when every breath inside this space feels like being granted divinity? it is on you to admit you think me a god and on me to admit i always love as if i am dying.

and what can be the difference between you and desire? it is the same concept. don’t you understand that i am a whole person and loving a whole person means eating your fill too many times? i am so sick and it is disheartening to witness my fall. i have loved you, a third of a person that you are, season by season. and every season it has grown worse, turned dark, grown bitter, grown lovelier and i am sick of it. i think of you as the lightest part of me, but i ache for you so deeply, in a dark way. and showing you what’s in my eyes, showing you all of this, is unimaginable


do i have to go as far as love will take me or can i resist its precious pull? it was sitting across from me at the dinner table one day telling me to get ready, and what made me even hungrier was the fact that i was not hungry at all but that it came to me at a time i had not asked for it. i hadn’t come home rummaging through the kitchen. hadn’t come home yearning in so long and maybe that’s why it flitted through my closed window, warm and barraging and yet fearful, unassuming.

but then the love gives me some dour look across the room, and honestly i have to flinch from its gaze. it especially hated when i asked my lover to play god, how i put the task on him but asked that he never come near me. i wanted that specific religion and that specific god in which i believed in neither.

sometimes i say your name in the dark and the room goes quiet, almost as if pressing back, still? so you still feel that? one day really i want to utter your name, have it move across the planet trying to slither back into some crevice inside me only to find that this time, it cannot make an impression. one day your name will move nothing inside me — one day my feelings for you won’t be delivered to you by the way i avoid the press of your eye.

i want to gather every morsel of what’s inside you, to take it in my hands and consume it, to taste the life you lived before me, to sample the world in you

what if i leave the love where it is and it grows unattended, that it gets worse for me and better for you? i mean in the sense that i grow more desperate, fall more in love, and better for you in the sense that you realize it? that you realize your power? i want you to understand your effect on me and at the same time shrivel away from the thought. the problem is we are fighting not to show each other, though you are horrible at it. the problem is that you are like a piece of rage in my shoulder blade that i can’t shut out. and love is, love is supposed to be peace! and that is still what i yearn for. and maybe i can cut it out of you, make you give that to me by fighting you. there must be some shard or peace, some shred of knowledge you have of giving it to a girl

what if i always believe in you but it’s the wrong thing? how you are so perfect and how i know that means you will stay away from me.

you walked in so cool, so cold, and maybe it was nothing to you but i, i couldn’t eat, i was sick to my stomach, my hands could draw ice. the back of my neck where you stood behind me began to burn though i didn’t have even one solid moment with your eyes. how could love still claim to know me after all this time? though it won’t touch me in crowded places with so many souls even still i can feel your influence. right behind the wing of my shoulder, hovering unbearably.

i have let your name grow have let it mean something and now i can’t kill it. it is not that i am afraid of love or trying to turn away from it, but that it has caught me on the coolest wire that i have been trying to detangle myself from, trying to let it go only to find for the first time that i am unable to

i always look at their hands now; no one will ever have hands like that no matter who it ends up being. why do i tell myself i am loveless for the sake of knowing what comes next?

trying to stop it from spreading. my mind is in fact plaguing every good thing. i am trying to be as good as i can after loving the wrong thing

it’s just that i run away and you stand so still doing nothing, and that i believed in you while you stood there. i thought you were facing me. after all this time of creating you softly in my dreams, stitch by stitch, detail by detail, my good eye incapsulating it all, every insignificant thing. and you watched me from the sidelines and would not join me. and writing about it will help. two years from now, five years from now i will have the art, the good art; and i will not have the pain, and that is all i can ask for

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