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My love was a habit and yours a hobby. You made a villain and victim out of a star child; whose brightness are you reflecting now?
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Twenty-three is quiet. Subtle. It ripples but does not make waves. It’s a dance, not a war. I have spent so many years learning and now I’m applying, living. I’m done being broken and I’m ready to write love into existence, even if it draws blood…
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To evolve, one must first die in some small way. One must trust the earth, really. The earth will strip her down to her bare bones. Discard the metaphors imprinted on her fingertips. Erase the allegories nestled in the crook of her neck. Expunge the imageries embroidered to the inside of her eyelids…
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Love here is more than an affair of romance—it is an affair of life, of simply being without reason or rhyme. Fill my pockets with stone and let me walk into the Seine! I’ll drown and come back to tell you what it is like to be in love with life…
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The sweltering heat is perhaps the primary thing I take from this holiday. The way the sun found me under gelato shop awnings, in ebbing gondolas, before sacred paintings, and within historic ruins to kiss my skin. Italy, you sweet creature, how will I ever look at the world the same?
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Aside from that voice in your head, who else has ever told you you are not where you are meant to be? ‘Society’ is not a valid response, and likely, you’ll find that the answer is ‘no one’…
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The little girl—before she grew the capacity for sadness and grudges—in the inflatable pool on the slope of her Ama’s driveway looks at me. Doe-eyed. Fringe plastered unflatteringly against her forehead that will be kissed a hundred times over. A slight upturn of her lips. A chipped tooth…
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Summer is when things begin to rot, the most forgiving season of all because everyone knows everyone has something rotting in their chest of drawers. And so I urge you: atone for your dreams and not your sins so long as the sun is out…
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Yes, you can bury a paper in the earth but it will not grow back into a tree; I can put you back in your cradle but you will not regain your innocence. There is so much you will be but you have forgotten so much of who you were…
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If I cannot write your peace into existence, I will ruin my books to build four walls around just so you could feel safe. I will line my pens against the sky to fashion a roof over your head. I will sit with you in this unbearable, terrible silence until your lungs remember how to…
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Like all dutiful children, there was a time when I almost drowned. A case of unhelpful coordination and fear of bodies larger than I…
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She’s back. She shows up in a ruckus at my door, swigging a bottle of wine, on her worst behavior. There is no incessant punching of the doorbell or rapping at the window demanding to be let in. I forget she still has a spare key…
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Despite some personal Sisyphean boulders, I’m making the most out of my last semester at university, seeing the city at night with people for whom I am grateful, and writing pieces I enjoy. If this is how the intersections of Mercury retrogrades and eclipse seasons are, please, by all means, sign me up for more!
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He is wondering why I went off script the first time around instead of playing the role I was supposed to play in his head. And so could I really blame him for choosing to work with an understudy?
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It is cannibalistic—my love—for I will strip off parts of my God-given self to sustain your being. It is like this that everyone who knows you thereafter has to learn the taste of my flesh. Let my demise postpone your decay…
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Blooming is more tedious an act than most dare to answer to. It is difficult to feed into the belief that beautiful things come to be so through suffering. Is there a conscience to beauty? Where does it lie?
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I’m out with lanterns looking for myself. I’m setting fireworks to scare off my fears. I’m red all over but not in the way the celebration has intended—instead with bite marks and fingernail imprints…
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Your moving on looks like swimming; mine looks like drowning. Do not confuse me for attempting to subdue you with the blue, I am only trying to prove to you its existence…
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I can’t seem to stop thinking that there is something wrong with me, like I swallowed an inherent flaw during a premature Christmas dinner that has since lodged itself in my lungs such that every time I inhale, I am reminded of its splintering existence…
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I will fall some more in this life, but I will fall better. I will look at the scenery as I fall. Instead of thinking where I’m going to land, I’m going to think about what I fell from, and remember that it was once mine to hold onto…
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There is no way of remembering how it felt to lie in my crib with four walls that constituted my whole world. I wonder, often, if I were to lie in it once more would it feel more like lying in my mother’s arms or like lying in a lidless coffin?
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I feel like a fraud. “Allison” isn’t even printed on my birth certificate; it is a corset I had sewn with my own two hands and forced myself to suffer until I could lace myself up in it, until there was a presentable image of myself…
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most nights, I wish the world were ending the next evening. so I might take a train to my younger self and tell her to do us both a favor…
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I think we grow up when we start to take on the responsibility of answering that question. Perhaps it’s a question that isn’t meant to be answered. But the process of trying to answer it is what forces us to grow up…
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