“but What If I’m Faking It?”

Love is admitting I’m human but hey, so are you and we’re doing our best and hoping our best is enough. Love is a coffee mug accompanied with an apology and a tight hug. Love is asleep on the couch, love plays way too many video games, love needs reassurance, love is messy, disorganised, flawed, irritating. Love is human.

how tragic we were. my therapist called it abuse last night. I don’t know how I didn’t see it. you would make me go on runs to lose weight and i’d say yes, anything for you. you’d guilt me into fucking you. call me fat and my body less desirable. how tragic it was. how I desperately wanted it to be perfect. how I watched everything we had disappear between my fingertips. I lost a part of me I thought I need. slowly. like baby teeth.

it was for the best. but it sure doesn’t feel like it.

I so want to be in bed with you right now, watching the office, wishing pam and jim together. main characters in our own love story, finding magic in even the most normal of places. my head on your shoulder and your hand on my thigh. sighing because god, isn’t this just the stuff of fairytales. aren’t afternoons spent in bed with your lover just inherently magical.

we kiss and we laugh and we get toast crumbs all over the pillowcase. everything I’ve ever wanted is here. everything I’ve ever wanted is you.

cherry picking things to smile about this summer. I need these things to keep going. all this love, food, films, songs...I grin, take big bites until I have a mouthful of sweetness. things are bad again. I’m tired and sad and slow all over again. everything that used to be colourful is grey and dark, depression is the fog that covers everything. but it’ll get better. I know it. with all this love and art and music, I’ll feel alive again.

altogether too empty to really quite exist. not pretty enough to make people stop and stare but just attractive enough to make a boy fall for the spark in my eyes. I feel like half a person, a waxing gibbous moon. had the potential to be something wonderful. don’t want to be normal or ordinary but I really am nothing special. that’s the curse of living I guess. you gotta live with the fact that you won’t be an elvis or a bowie or a keats.

sunshine lover. body shaped like the word devour and I’m hungry, so hungry. sunshine lover. come lay in the garrets of my heart. let me kiss your wrists. let me love you. let me take all of you for myself. won’t you come linger, love?

winter lover. I’ll never be your snow covered sweetheart, wrapped up in a white sheet. you’ve devoured every aching corner of my heart. winter lover. all my poetry and writing is yours, though I didn’t want them to be. winter lover. cut my wrists. staple them to a cross. I am nothing more than yours.

lavender kisses, sunshine eyes and tight hugs. heaven takes the shape of a boy with blonde hair, long legs and clumsy words. he’s got a smile as soft as his heart. smells like cinnamon and sugar. he’s so sweet in and out and i can’t think about him and not smile, can’t write about him without blushing. his name next to mine still makes my heart skip a beat.

come teach me why flowers grow better with blood-based fertiliser. come bury me in the ripe plum of your body, tangle around me like ivy. see, im so tired of dragging around this empty casket of a mind. see, i know I shouldn’t but baby, I’m fucking hopeless over you.

every time I talk about my own abuse for the sake of justice or awareness, all the words punch the back of my throat, a heavy thumping that spills from my mouth like the ugly mess it was. it’s still so painful and emptying and numbing all at the same time. It feels like I spoil the conversation, that I’m being uncouth or impolite. my story has no place anywhere.

a glass just empty, full of unoccupied space. a head tangled with words. I’m still confused about the concept of justice. and love. and forgiveness. it just feels unfair. just feels so wrong to make my own body’s safety into a movement or a form of activism. I don’t want to be loud or strong or empowered, I just want to be safe.

this world, full of its misogyny and hatred towards women, doesn’t help. The vilification of victims in the media makes me feel even smaller. the internalisation of misogyny, undermining my own pain because of my body’s “crimes” doesn’t help either.

my voice sometimes doesn’t feel like my own. my body never feels like it belongs to me. all this activism and anger and pain and I still can’t shake the feeling.

I worry about other girls. I worry about their voices being stolen not only by their abusers, or society but also by themselves.

the gentle hand reaching out from the grave. the wandering ghost and the haunting of a life that wasn’t meant to be. a life spent with you.

you were so bad for me, the way you bent me over my own grave and called it love. moaning into that demon’s kiss as I rolled my eyes in ecstasy, ready to give into this little death. ready to die and haunt the corridors of each other’s lives. how sweet destructive romance tastes on our lips, how empty all this is.

we made a graveyard of this didn’t we, honey? dug up too many skeletons and wandered too far from home, feigning surprise when we got lost in the dark. walking amongst our own destruction, holding each other tightly.

rotten love. dirty, rotten love that was dead before it even started.