what i like and what you like are two different creatures and there is a lake, separating us. i can feel love trying to be the open wound; now i will never know love even when i see it in other people because i saw your eyes first. it is infuriating to see imperfection and for my body to go after it anyway. and god why make us this way?

how do i take your brain so that everything i want comes out of it? 

i think in the deepest hours of the night i find where god hid my hands during the day. i snap them on like gloves. my words repel the daytime; i can only write seriously at midnight.

i think about god in the following ways: the universe can be cruel when it wants results. i think about every bad thing i’ve ever tasted on my tongue, how the memories flood at the drop of a hat, in and out of me so quickly before i can recognize it for what it is. the suffering i must feel in order to write. god giving me these pair of hands so i can tear myself apart? to remember this suffering once i’m no longer here? god gave me these hands because god needed me to. i think about how every bad broken thing and the things i say that make people ask me why i’m not a therapist, why i don’t have some phd in psychiatry. everything that comes out of my mouth i try to warn people what it’s like.

what if i gave up literature and dedicated my life to science so i could understand? what if i listened to psychology, anatomy, followed the rules, swallowed your pills of logic, learned each part of the brain, the body, the workings—would it help me know what you’re like? since your mouth is my enemy. since my muse, you are untrustworthy. unreliable. writing has only given me speculation, has only imprinted my fear deeper to walk up to you. if i branded your practicality into my brain, could science give you to me?

never knew i could know someone entered the room without raising my eyes

i wish you could not help being yourself the way you cannot help wanting me. if i could entrust technology with the laborious task of creating something that could make me wipe the layer from your eyes so i could see what’s inside. that would save both of us the humiliation. instead of the useless phones if they could spend the next two decades working on a new thing that could make me see what you’re like without you needing to show me, without me having to get it from you because you’d be so difficult, so annoying about it.

a year trips and falls into a year and a half, and i’d been thinking that if i could write about you for so long, you were supposed to be mine. is this what god wants? for me to come to these cruel conclusions on my own? that it was a love i had self-prophesied instead of one that god himself had dreamt

i think about eating you at a dinner table. yes i think about it. in one moment of your unawareness my eyes could extract so much from you.

love is horrifying when it isn’t actually. is it finishing for me then? is this the place it walks out on me? i think i am more afraid of the empty space. hi. goodbye. then what was this? what could it still be? love has cut up my eyes so badly all in this one circumstance i don’t know if i can keep myself open tomorrow, if i can open my eyes again to this cruel world so empty, everywhere, everywhere i look.

all the places i saw love before now i see emptiness, a thing that is taking up space quickly and quickly around me, the more the anxiety over the excitement fades. whatever is the opposite of opportunity, i see that. everything i am scared of comes back to tap me on the shoulder and what do you do when something touches you, don’t you turn around and look at it?

english, english. it hasn’t let these feelings in me bode well. you’ve let this brew for so long that i am just waiting, waiting for it. i am going to be sick.

that language you grew up cradling to your chest how scary would it be for us if i spoke those words to you how badly would it make this if i reminded you of what you’ve always known

 i swear to god God, if you’ve written for me such a mundane tragedy i won’t write anymore. 

but i know you will never say anything, and that maybe if my life continues i’ll still wait

explain this desire to me. my love for you. both of us. loathing vulnerability. did you cast a spell? i wouldn’t mind if you had bad intentions to get an ending with me. show me what you mean when you say ‘love’.

that you are or aren’t real. i can sense your desire even through our heavy coats. to be on the receiving end. tied to me. you’ve mastered english but it’s not enough to understand me, you won’t understand if i tell you. if i write it down, if it comes out of my mouth. which one is easier?

i can’t understand. i’m thinking about this gap between love and translation, and you want me and you can speak it but you won’t understand me when i’m ready to tell you. i think about your first language all the time and i’m trying to find a way to tell you there where it can reach you instantly. like it can hit you. like you aren’t really feeling it now if i use this empty language. we grew up with the same language but the words die on my tongue faster, they aren’t natural for me.

i sat there wondering last night why you don’t stare at your hands just kissing them

today your existence is burned to the insides of my eyes. i will have you or i will keep me to myself for the rest of my life and these men can keep looking but i will keep my eyes ahead. i will waste my beauty that i didn’t earn and i will love you with it. i will love you with only that i have in this life, these words which i can pile atop my shoulders and stuff into my arms and walk about the world with, walking and walking and always searching silently, craning my neck as if in pride and not as though i am in search, my lips sealed stubbornly with no plea of love escaping me. but i will always wonder. i will walk about with these words and one day they will all tumble, i will drop them with age, the color of my eyes you dreamt of peering into watering away, the intensity that you loved growing soft. and, the burning in our hearts will fade. i can’t tell the future, but i imagine somehow that the burning always does, it must fade, that it must.

1/2/23

how long the winter break seemed to drag on when i loved someone, i’ve been washing my hands every day but this time getting you off of me. if the days can go by this quickly it means i’ve been washing them well. now when i get back i will stay attached to every classroom every building at school, i will never leave and my hands will be so clean of love it will scare me