dearauroraa

[dearauroraa]

bojack horseman wasn't just a show when bojack said "‎every time something good happens, i ruin it. that’s not an accident. i’m the thing that ruins things.” // and when todd said "you're all the things that are wrong with you" // and when beatrice said "you were born broken, that’s your birthright. and now you can fill your life with projects, your books and your movies and your little girlfriends, but it won’t make you whole." // and when princess carolyn said "i don't know how you expect me to love you when you so clearly hate yourself." // and when hollyhock said "did you ever think that maybe the reason you’re not happy is because you don’t want to be?" // and when kelsey said "you’re not the hero of this story. you’re not even the villain. you’re just some guy who ruined my life." // and when mr. peanutbutter said "it's so cruel to let people love you" // and when herb said "there's no other side. this is it."

[dearauroraa]

dear mom,

please stay with me / please leave me / please be alive all the time / please don't tell me how to live my life / teach me everything that i must know / don't teach me anything / meet me in every universe / never meet me as my mother / forgive me for every sin / i might never forgive you for anything / please hold me when i fall apart / please don’t ask me why i’m breaking / please be proud of me / please don’t expect too much / name me after the stars / forget who i am / be the one who understands / be the one i rebel against / make me your home / let me leave yours / sing me songs from the past / stay silent when i can’t bear sound / love me unconditionally / love me with boundaries / see me as your child / see me as a stranger / please stay where i can find you / please vanish when i need to grow / write me into your story / let me write my own / please be the beginning / please not the end / please, mom, be real / and if you can’t, please be kind in my dreams.

[dearauroraa]

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss by Antonio Canova

by Sappho

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out by Richard Siken

To Fanny Brawne (13 October, 1819), John Keats

The Kiss, 1907 by Gustav Klimt

The Meeting in a Dream, Jorge Luis Borges

Holy Things in This World, Emery Allen

You Are Jeff by Richard Siken

[dearauroraa]

I’m here now where you were.

The summer grass under my palms is your hair.

Your taste is the living air.

I lie on my back. Two juggling butterflies are your smile.

The heathery breath of the moor’s simply your smell.

Your name sounds on the coded voice of the bell.

I’ll go nowhere you’ve not.

The bleached dip in a creature’s bone’s your throat.

That high lark, whatever it was you thought.

And this ridged stone your hand in mine,

and the curve of the turning earth your spine,

and the swooning bees besotted with flowers your tune.

I get up and walk. The dozing hillside is your dreaming head.

The cobblestones are every word you said.

The grave I kneel beside, only your bed.

Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy

[dearauroraa]

there were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping the last of the light in their upturned petals. i followed you in, under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished.

the moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. we undressed, then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. we knelt in the leaves, kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.

didn’t we? And didn’t I see you rise again and go deeper into the woods and follow you still, till even my childhood shrank to a glow-worm of light where those flowers darkened and closed.

thorns on my breasts, rain in my mouth, loam on my bare feet, rough bark grazing my back, I moaned for them all. you stood, waist deep, in a stream, pulling me in, so I swam. You were the water, the wind

in the branches wringing their hands, the heavy, wet perfume of soil. i am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. find me.

Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy

[dearauroraa]

they say that the observable universe is still stretching vast and infinite, yet i still see only you. the stars keep collapsing and reform in the quiet violence of cosmic rebirth, but none of their light reaches the corners of my chest where your shadow resides. galaxies spiral endlessly, they carry eternity, but their glory fades against the time i spent holding your gaze.

i think of you as the fabric of space and as time stretches and wraps, it drags me through the memories i fail to forget. the silence of the void in space mirrors the hollow ache between us. there's a vacuum in my rib cage where a star burns brightly for a moment before it collapses, exactly the way your voice still lingers in the ruins of my thoughts.

the black hole in me swallows everything but the image of you slips away. and even though the universe expands, even though the distance between stars grows wider with every heartbeat, i am always orbiting you, as if a dying moon circling a planet that has long forgotten its satellite.

and i wonder if you feel it too, this gravitational pull. i wonder if your chest compresses under the weight of unsaid truths and regrets too.

what i am trying to say is that the observable universe is a paradox, vast and indifferent, yet it cannot imitate the way i hold every piece of me that aches for you.

and i wonder if, somewhere in the endless expanse, there's a galaxy i will never touch, there is another version of us—that is mortal.

but here, in this universe, you are the star i cannot reach and i am the space between us, expanding forever.

[dearauroraa]

Like any good son, I pull my father out

of the water, drag him by his hair

through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail

the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

beyond the shore is no longer

where we left it. Because the bombed

cathedral is now a cathedral

of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

I might sink. Do you know who I am,

Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming

with seawater. He is so still I think

he could be anyone’s father, found

the way a green bottle might appear

at a boy’s feet containing a year

he has never touched. I touch

his ears. No use. I turn him

over. To face it. The cathedral

in his sea-black eyes. The face

not mine—but one I will wear

to kiss all my lovers good-night:

the way I seal my father’s lips

with my own & begin

the faithful work of drowning.

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong

[dearauroraa]

In the body, where everything has a price,

I was a beggar. On my knees,

I watched, through the keyhole, not

the man showering, but the rain

falling through him: guitar strings snapping

over his globed shoulders.

He was singing, which is why

I remember it. His voice—

it filled me to the core

like a skeleton. Even my name

knelt down inside me, asking

to be spared.

He was singing. It is all I remember.

For in the body, where everything has a price,

I was alive. I didn’t know

there was a better reason.

That one morning, my father would stop

—a dark colt paused in downpour—

& listen for my clutched breath

behind the door. I didn’t know the cost

of entering a song—was to lose

your way back.

So I entered. So I lost.

I lost it all with my eyes

wide open.

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong

[dearauroraa]

i want to tell you that the sun is too cold for the burns that this fire causes. what i mean by that is, if you twist the doorknob and walk out right now; the only person turning to ash in this house that has always felt less like home and more like a war zone, will be me.

it's tuesday and i'm terrified of endings, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

every time i look at the sky a star bursts into nothing.

who is god if not someone who takes takes takes?

Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

god still knocks on my door every night. i still serve him on a platter. but before that, i tell him there's an angry man in my house. i am the glass that breaks when he screams.

my house is built on ruins of my tethered bones, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

faceless men no longer hurt me in my sleep. instead, the man in my house does.

my house is built on ruins of my tethered bones, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

for me you were an avalanche, breaking apart things in your wake and i allowed myself, this once, to be something that is yours to take.

can it be heartbreak if it was never really love? Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

i want to tell you in this dream, love is a sacred entity haunting the walls of my miserable and lonely town. that it is unachievable. in this dream, i am convinced that love is tainted and buried deep in a place i can never reach. and yet. and yet, your hands in mine have somehow spent an eternity basked in its glow.

in this dream, you hold my hand and i tell you love is unachievable, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

you hold my hand and walk me over to the edge of my grief and ask me to jump. i do so with eyes closed, whispering prayers that sound like curses at a god who will only watch; never intervene. i want to tell you the halo of grief is wide and uncertain and the light at the center of it is fickle. that my name on your lips is my anchor and there is a sweet torture in floating towards the unknown and remaining restrained to something unavoidable at the same time.

in this dream, you hold my hand and i tell you love is unachievable, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

i have always been the one to draw out blood from healing wounds and you tell me that it's not something that i was born with. how can it not be? how can it not be when i have come out of the womb clinging to the thorns of bitterness and blood that was clotting around the edges of my mother's rage? misery has always tasted sweet on your lips and no matter how many hours i spend trying to taint it with the anger inside me, it remains undeterred. tethered to the sanity that you hold in a tight fist.

in this dream, you hold my hand and i tell you love is unachievable, Nishtha.

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[dearauroraa]

your memory lives in me like the scent of your cologne. like the bitterness from the last words you ever said to me. like the cold that my hands dreaded when you held them for the last time. what i mean is, your memory lives in me. tainted, tired and forlorn but never forgotten.

i don't remember your birthday anymore, Nishtha.

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