Trigger Warning:

my love, there’s never enough time is there? I always say to myself after I’ve left you that I wish I had kissed you harder, wish I had hugged you tighter, wish I could’ve stayed a little while longer. the clocks are just never on our side, are they?

please, leave your phone in my bag and come visit me tomorrow to get it. please, call me when I get home to check I’m okay. please, spend your evenings at mine, curled up on the couch like you belong here, next to my notebooks and coffee mugs and paintings. It seems that I don’t quite know how to midnight without you.

when I turn to leave you after I’ve kissed your cheek goodbye, every single time I wish I could run back to you and say “oh, 5 more minutes won’t hurt”. every single time, I turn to look at you and find you still waiting where I left you, smiling, saying that you love me. you love me. you love me.

you hurt me. convinced me that the light that possessed our bodies was liquid love. ruined me. all that brightness ruined me. i have holes in me now. darkness poking through my skin and seeping from my bones. haunted now.

borrowed time, green eyes and sunshine. oh how these river currents move like your body on top of mine. like the quiet disappointment of your wandering eye. how i could live, die and breathe in this moment, experience eighty years of heaven and hell with you. the sun on my skin feels like a kiss. steady, lover. stay with me through the summer.

see, I turn silent during sex. my voice buries itself in my throat like a messy bloodclot. how could I be anything other than passive anyway? anything other than silent? my abuser carries my voice around like his souvenir, has split my body in two and took one half with him. left me with skin I don’t recognise, a body that still mistakes warmth for war. i turn silent during sex. let his hands paint orchids on my neck, let his fingers climb up me in search of my secrets, let his body into mine until I have nowhere to put the bad memories. this body isn’t mine. I don’t think it ever will be.

To be loved is to be eaten, ripped to the bone, skin tender and pink. A blush so bloody, my sweet killer, collaborators in each other’s demise.

To love is to attend hundreds of funerals of the person they used to be. How many did I create? How many did I kill? Have you done the same to me, my love?

To be loved is to die and to be reborn in their kiss over and over and over again, the resurrection painful as my bones rearrange to fit the mould of your body.

To love is to kill, heart in your hands and safety in your mouth. I am the funeral pyre and you are the onlooker, crying tears of grief but warmed by the flames. I burn to keep you safe, lover.

To be loved is to consume, gag, swallow everything whole, the sugar too sickly sweet, body unused to softness like this.

To love is to scream, is to lose in this battle for two, is to be vulnerable and hopeful and innocent and lost and found. A paradigm of desperate emotions.

To be loved is to kiss and suffocate but not pull away, no, never pull away.

“(To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.)”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. (via xshayarsha)

7:59am. did I tell you he’s kept every single one of my love letters in his wallet?

you’re right across the bridge, laying in bed and my hands are shaking from holding back from you so I’ve turned to writing. this is the way I kiss you when you’re gone.

I write so much about love because I’ve lived a life of so devoid of it till now. how can I not write about you? this beautiful break of sunshine in my otherwise cloudy world. how can I not weave through the gardens of poetry trying to pick out the most beautiful bouquet of metaphors for you?

those green eyes in the summertime. clammy hands in the winter. bronze skin shining under the sun like you’re made of gold. tender breathing when you lie next to me. the way the breeze plays with your hair in spring. it seems like the universe loves you just as much as I do.

Kim Addonizio, from ‘Blues for Roberto’, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems