jillianbowe-blog

[jillianbowe-blog]

#NATIONALSCHOOLWALKOUT

It takes a dead body an average of 24 hours before it starts to smell. The differences are found in the weight, the temperature, the willingness of the nose to smell it and the importance of the corpse. No one lets it sit any longer. No one lets it get any more uncomfortable. It takes an AR-15 an average of less than five seconds before it kills someone. The differences are found in the accuracy of the shot, the size of the school, and the media coverage the day gets. No one lets the cameras roll past when the corpses stop smelling. No one lets the people see these bodies as anything more than bodies. No one lets them see the way they smiled before the silence. It takes the media an average of one week before they forget about the shooting. The difference is in the amount of money from the school district, whether or not the victims were student athletes, and the volume of the school body’s voice. No one lets it sit any longer. No one lets it get any more uncomfortable. Why do we put a price on these kids’ deaths? Why do we keep forgetting about the day after the gun is fired? It takes the people an average of an entire lifetime to forget how to grieve. There is no difference in what it feels like to wake up from nightmares to hear gunshots. There is no difference in what it feels like to look up in math class and feel gunshots. There is no difference in what it feels like to be afraid. How much longer until we are next? How many more breaths will I take in this reading before I join Parkland? Before I join Columbine? Sandy Hook? Cleveland? Lexington Park? Nashville? How many more breaths do we have to take before someone listens? Let the whole world hear us. Let us claw our way into every history book for everyone who will not be here to see them written. This fear does not make us weak; this fear makes us human. And how hard that is to be. How hard it is to worry about the little things with this blood on our country’s hands. How hard it is to be a soldier before a student. It takes the government an average of 2 months to pass legislation. The difference is in the publicity the president would get, the amount of times he tweets, the way the dead bodies look in the pictures, the way all of us will not stop yelling until you can only hear our voices instead of gunshots, until you can only see our fists instead of assault rifles, until we speak up for every student we have lost. People are dying. What more do you need? How many more sacrifices will we have to make to prove to you we are here? It takes a student an average of one minute to join a movement. The difference is in the people who are paying attention. America, are you listening? We are here. We are one. And we are not going anywhere.

[jillianbowe-blog]

stones

every day that i relearn what it is like to be unwanted, i teach my body how to skip stones. i start with reacquainting my shoulder with my arm and my arm with my wrist and my wrist with all the words i have not been able to let roll from the back of my throat into the water. i have never really known much about technique, but, i do know, i am really good at skipping over this deep ocean of every time someone has ever left me or told me they loved me with only half their smile, and i know, there are ripples in the water from where i have been left that go everywhere. there are parts of me i have not even met that belong wholly to other people. i find it paralyzing. i find it completely, inevitably, avoidable, the way i give myself to other people by not feeling a thing when they are not near. they do not notice. they never do. but, to say all this is to create a wave, so, instead, i skip stones. i find it easier, this way. all ripples, no sound. just skipping. don’t you?

[jillianbowe-blog]

fifteen texts i have never sent you and probably never will unless, by some chance, you read this poem:

1. I heard this song today that reminded me of you. I couldn’t understand the lyrics; I could only hear the guitar, but I know you’d love it. 2. I am sad right now in the laziest of ways. How long can you be sad about the fact that there is no one that loves you? I suppose I will find out. I hope you don’t mind, I had to tell someone. 3. It’s not even that I’m trying to write poetry about you, it’s that I see it in my head and it won’t go away until it’s on paper. 4. Do you believe in God? 5. I believe that if there is a God, it exists in other people. You support this theory. 6. I miss you. 7. I wish people didn’t only talk to me when they needed something, you know? I think you’d understand. You always do. 8. I imagine in a different life, I am someone’s favorite hello. I hope, in that one, you are everyone’s (as if you aren’t already). 9. If there is a day in the future that we speak for the last time, I do not want to see it. 10. I thought about you this morning. 11. I thought about you and I wrote this poem. 12. I’m sorry for all the words I cannot use to tell you who you are. 13. I’m sorry for all the ways I will inevitably try. 14. Thank you. 15. For everything.

[jillianbowe-blog]

lighthouse

The tallest lighthouse in the world is the Jeddah Light in Saudi Arabia. I read this, and have no idea what to do with this information. I know nothing about lighthouses, other than the fact that they are used both as warning signals and as a way to say, “You’ve made it. It’s safe now. Welcome home.” I’ve wanted this tattoo of the outline of a lighthouse for about a year now. I suppose I want something to remind me that there will always be someone searching to tell their seaside story. So, when I meet you, and every word you say looks like coming home, I realize that I’ve known you just about as long as I’ve wanted this tattoo. And I don’t think my head knew this yet when it happened, but I do know my soul must’ve laughed, said, just wait until she talks to you about music. Just wait. So I do, and then, I start to hear you in every song with good rhythm. I ask you, without ever really saying anything, Let me learn what your heartbeat sounds like. I think I know, but my soul wants proof. It tells me there is no way any person could possibly be this much constant rhythm, yet here you are. Here I am, driving to the nearest lighthouse, just to see your face, just to test my theory, just to write these poems that i’ve had stuck in my head since I realized who you are. I think maybe, in some past life, I am sitting next to you on the beach. We are listening to old music, carrying our oldest memories of what it is like to meet the person you’ve already somehow known for a lifetime. I feel you in this room next to me as I write and i wonder if, wherever you are, you feel me thinking this. i don’t know what any of this means and as much as i want to, i’m not sure i ever will. I think there are a lot of things I’ll never know, like more pointless lighthouse facts, or how to put my hair up in a bun that doesn’t make me look completely bald, but you are the most curious thing I completely understand without understanding at all. So, when people ask me why I only like writing sad poetry, I tell them: well, it’s not that I like writing it, it’s just that writing happy poetry just feels like writing lines without knowing what they mean. What I don’t tell them is, before who you were finally poked through the ground in our spring, which was the middle of october, i was writing lines just to write lines. then, I met you and I meant them. I met you, and they all made sense. I met you, and I wrote, on the side of my own lighthouse, in bold letters, “You’ve made it. It’s safe now. Welcome home.”

[jillianbowe-blog]

i met you and all the lines i had ever written finally made sense

a poem i have yet to write

[jillianbowe-blog]

apparently it’s always about my sleep habits

tonight, i go to bed early. by early i mean 12:30am, and by bed i mean i write poetry about how lonely i am and share it with no one because there is no one here to read it. i think the worst thing about loving other people this much is that you forget how to just be by yourself, so, i sit here alone in an uncomfortable silence even though it would be weirder if there was conversation, because, as i keep reminding myself, there is no one here with me. there is no one here with me, but everyone is here for me. i find it ironic because no one is loving me but everyone loves me. they love me, but only when i ask. they love me, but they only love me back, so, i sit in my bed and learn how to fold all of the words i want to say into paper airplanes and i throw them up and then, wonder why i can only find them when i’m high, or in poetry, or past midnight. she tells me there is no one else like me. i say yes, because there is no one else that is stupid enough to use these bullets as body armor, to consider these bullet holes new places to breathe, can’t you see me drowning in my own blood and calling it air? can’t you see anything? i wave, like maybe, you’ll see me, but i don’t even see my own hand. and that is probably because the lights are off, but i think that it’s something deeper than that, so, i resolve by thinking: i suppose i forgot what my own voice sounded like. i suppose i haven’t been listening for it for a very long time. and just like that, it makes sense. just like that, i wake up.

[jillianbowe-blog]

the five minute poem

i told myself i’d go to bed by ten o’clock. it is 11:30 (well, 11:29, actually) and i have just stopped crying (well, only mostly, actually) and i am not sure how many times i can do this before i admit to myself that this is a problem. so, instead of confronting myself, i think about all of the types of music i’ve ever loved. your name shows up on the list. it’s funny, because, to some people you will always be just a person. how unlucky those people are. you tell me you have never met anyone like me, and i do not know how to tell you that i have never loved a mirror but i see one in you all the time. i go to tell you i can’t describe it and then i think that maybe my poetry can. so, i write myself a letter and ask my head to tell you all the ways i see my words in the way you speak and hope that my lungs recognize that we breathe this similar air and i wait. give me five minutes, i say. what i don’t say is, there will never be enough time to explain to you every hello that i hear in your voice, but i want you to know, tomorrow lives in your veins. i will be there for every second of it. i see it. i hope you can, too.

[jillianbowe-blog]

the skydiver’s lament

I ask my gay ex boyfriend how his date with this new guy went and he says, it was great, says, he loves him, says, “and before he left, I gave him one of those kisses, one of those that really means something, yknow?” And I don’t know. I have no idea what he is talking about. How can you expect something so small to convey a message that big? I go downstairs, open the door handle with two hands, thinking maybe this will show everyone how sick I am of being here, and I look for all the little things. Maybe the fact that he didn’t kiss me after our second month dating should’ve shown that he was gay, or maybe the fact that I didn’t mind should’ve shown that I was, it’s kind of a funny story that way. I like to tell people of all my relationships, mine with him was the best; nothing ever hurt because nothing ever happened, freshman year has that effect on people. I tell him this story, how he is the only person I’ve been with who has not cheated on me, the only person I loved who did not take someone else’s right now over my tomorrow, and he laughs. It sounds like I am shouting into the grand canyon and all I hear is echo, his laughter is the rumbling thunder of the reverb of arizona. He says, well, I never wanted to cheat on you, it’s just, something that happened, he kissed me a few times, that’s all, at least it doesn’t matter. He says it like cheating is accidentally leaving cookies in the oven just a little too long, a happy accident, but at least in that scenario you end up with something. And how ironic that I could not even keep my spot as a closeted gay boy’s beard, even when it goes unbeknownst to him that he is wearing one. And how ironic that the lesbian still finds herself broken-hearted over her freshman year boyfriend, not because she loved him but because she wanted to love herself. Because she doesn’t know if she deserves to anymore. How strange that we find so much of our worth in other people. He asks me if I am okay and I hand him my “yeah, I’m fine,” like the hastily scribbled birthday card you finish writing on your way through the door, welcomed to a party you do not want to be at, but, i’ve always been really good at staying to avoid the inconvenience, so when he says to me “it doesn’t matter, because, at least you’re gay”, I laugh like laughing is the only thing I know how to do. I laugh, and I mean, Two years after my heart went skydiving for the first time with no parachute, my friend makes a comment in passing, says, “well, she never loved you.” And I hear, she left your parachute unpacked on purpose. I hear, do not be so silly to think that someone could love a skydiver, I hear, you have always been meant to fall, this is your destiny, this is what you were built for- tell me why I still have nightmares about my body hitting the ground. I am so sick of writing heartbreak poems. And how could I have known? No one tells you that relationships do not end when they are over. I feel a tap on the shoulder. “do you regret it? dating her, I mean.” I realize I have been talking out loud this whole time- heartbreak has a tendency to be the most vocal predator- and I say no. I say, this is the girl who always made sure I had enough to eat and who always told me she thought I was beautiful, especially when I did not agree. i gave everything I had to keep the good parts of her with me, see, she had to have my heart before she could break it. after the first time I caught her cheating, she held me when I cried, and we walked to the grocery store after holding hands. nothing about that girl is anything less than human. so, when I tell you I loved her, I am not lying. I am just saying... goodbye. maybe some day I’ll mean it.

[jillianbowe-blog]

pipe dream (smoky love)

He tells me he doesn't know why I don't want him to smoke cigarettes. After all, he says, it's a lot like poetry- they're both things that revolve around burning. He smiles when he says it, as if he has finally won. I laugh, then frown, shake my head, say, “not everything is a metaphor.” He tells me to get over myself and wonders why I stop sending him my poetry. And I tell myself to get over him, and wonder why whenever I write, it’s about his hands. it is so easy to love your heartbreak, to let these back roads become your neighborhood, It is so easy to make the places you crack the most interesting things about you. It snowed for the first time this year on a Thursday. I am on the way home and my car slides out into an intersection at a red light. My car and the ice play tug of war with my wheels and my car always loses. I have to reteach myself how to drive every winter. I have to reteach myself that just because ice is cracked does not mean it is not there, have to reteach myself that just because the sun is out does not mean the snow is gone, have to reteach myself that just because I slam on the brakes does not mean my car knows how to stop going forward, have to reteach myself that not everything is a metaphor. Do you know what it’s like to fall in love with something that is burning? I ask him. He tells me he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, I say, I love you, he says, you’re being a pain in the fucking ass, and isn’t that the truth. Aren’t I just the hammer? Aren’t I just the answer to the “break glass in case of emergency”? Isn’t this how you put out fires? And, Isn’t it crazy that I loved him the most? Not because he treated me well, but because he treated everyone else worse? I fell in love with the fire before I realized it was burning down everything I loved. He tells me he’s gonna hurt my friends, he’s gonna hurt anyone who hurts me, I swear, he says, I’m going to fucking kill them, I’m going to fucking kill them, I’ll do it, I will, so I teach myself how to drive, and I go to the gas station and respond by buying all of their lighters. He says fuck you, I say, yeah, you did, yeah, you fucked me over. I say thank you, he asks me why, and I say for being the best thing that could happen to my poetry. He never smoked anyway. He just wanted me to know he could, so I would know he would always be the secondhand smoke from every time my heart breaks, and he is. Now, every time my stomach drops, I call it love. Now, every time I love, I call it his name. I call it his cigarettes. After all, he says, it’s a lot like poetry; they’re both things that destroy you. They’re both things that rip you apart with no remorse. They’re both things that will leave you gasping, out of breath, and lifeless. He smiles when he says it, as if he has finally won. I laugh, then frown, shake my head, say, “I’m leaving.” And for once, He is the one that is burning.

[jillianbowe-blog]

so the beach was less a paradise, more hurricane backwash. so the afternoon sped straight on into the pitch-black night spent together, but apart. so you drank the witch hazel and shattered the screens but their face was still there, burning, burning, burning.  throw in the towel. burn the poems. there’s no love so good that you can’t grind it out like an old cigarette.  you chose ‘now’ and maybe it should have been ‘never’. who cares. start again. drink out of bottles, not people. shatter the cup. use the pieces to cut your brake lines. set the whole car on fire, if you have to. you’re not in the desert anymore. lick the wounds. fuck the earthquake. howl at the moon. run for cover. you don’t have to be a poet in order to say, save yourself. we are still young and still foolish and still writing about our hearts, but they were never meant to be eaten.

THE POET RETRACTS HER EARLIER STATEMENT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE, by jones howell (via joneshowell)

[jillianbowe-blog]

ACT I

In this dirty place, the air is yellow. The sky, slack-jawed and questioning, is painted multiple impossible colors to give the audience a clue of the doom to come. The hero begins at the center and walks forward, and keeps walking, right out the door. No one sees this coming. Lights flicker orange. The rain falls upwards. The hero doesn’t know he’s the hero yet. ACT II

Here is the person who will become the villain, but first you have to love him. Everything dissolves into progressively fainter shades of purple. Snow falls from the rafters and it represents innocence, obviously, and also the guilty remnants, crude and incurable, still buried beneath it. Now we know this is our villain. Hands to our throats, we still hope for the best. ACT III The end is tinged pink and sounds like an orchestra out of tune. The body of the villain is laid out soft and crooked center stage. The hero, hands painted red to symbolize sin, staggers into the light. The rain falls upwards. The hero knows he’s the villain. Human and doomed, he yells to the audience: FORGIVE ME YOU HAVE TO FORGIVE ME I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I COULD BECOME.

[jillianbowe-blog]

to tell the sun good morning

It is 10:30pm. And to me, that means nothing. I measure time in how long it is until I see you, or in all the ways my heart trips over itself to get to you, so, in that case, time has stopped. And what I️ mean by that is- You are walking me out to my car in 30 degree weather, with no shoes on, wearing my sweatshirt. You tell me to blast the heat in my car and to text you when I get home safe even though you are the one who must be freezing, and I try to memorize what your smile looks like right now. All of a sudden, I don’t care about the fact that I am supposed to be home in 5 minutes, or that it feels like hypothermia is knocking on my front door, or that I cannot remember how to say “I love you” without also saying “I’m sorry”. And I flash back to an hour ago, in a basement I’ve never been in before with people I’ve never met, and you are singing, and I swear that there is no level of heaven that does not have your voice in it, and you look at me. You smile, and I realize you are singing to me. It is crazy to think that I am the subject of a love song. Isn’t that something? I love music. I love you. No asterisks. “That’s your fucking girlfriend, dude, she’s your fucking girlfriend, you’re so lucky.” I know, You have no idea. I am all pine trees and she is all sunrise, spilling over me in the morning, letting everyone know she is there and shining and she is not leaving, and then me. I am a forest of loving-feels-like-pine-needles type of heartbreak, but with her, there is light. I will always be reaching for her. Always. And I snap back to reality. Streetlights paint us like watercolors and I take the canvas in my hands, hang it in the bedroom of my haunted house mind- maybe living here won’t be so bad if I add some color. So I rip down all the black wallpaper, smash all of yesterday’s hourglass love, and I build a sundial. I place it in my front yard and then one hundred more all around town, so I always see you. Wherever you are is where I want to be. You. With your sunrise smile. You are are the kind of person people write poetry about. Somehow, I am the lucky one that gets to do it. So I drive home and I text the girl who is still with you- “I think I’m in love with her.” “I think you are too.” I️ smile. Is it that obvious? Good. I hope she knows. I hope she does. Because, she is a book full of poems. I never want to stop reading her, as long as she’ll let me. This must be what love feels like. And if it is? Then yeah, This is worth it. Finally. I am home. Good morning.

[jillianbowe-blog]

the Morning after

The morning after it happens, my mother makes eggs for four people. She does not know that that evening she will only be making dinner for three. My brother does not go to school for six days and does not do any of his late work. My father throws out college acceptance letters because there is nothing for them to accept anymore. There is no accepting a body as anything but what it is. Not as a person, or as a sunrise, or as an apology. Suicide is not a lonely ghost. Suicide is a bedroom door that no one opens, A car that no one drives- Suicide is the empty seat in the back of the classroom, at the lunch table, on family road trips. It is always taking up too much space. The morning after it happens, my mother finds the body. And I assume she cleans up the blood. And in this story, it is not made of flowers, or oceans, or tomorrows, it is made of skin and of bones. It is made of veins and of blood. This is not the poem where I want to kill myself, this is the poem where I already have. This is the poem where my body is not a metaphor, but it is just a body. it is just the stain on my bathroom floor. it is the stain on the breakfast my mom makes the next morning. it is the stain on every piece of tomorrow that will not come. and it knows. it waves goodbye but tomorrow does not wave back, because tomorrow is just a day and not a person and it does not mourn me. it does not carry my drowned body to the shore because it does not have hands, and depression is not an ocean, depression is not saltwater. depression is sick. depression is heavy, and real, and silent, and making it a metaphor does not make it any more tangible. does not make it any easier to kill. does not make it any easier to run away from. I tried running and my legs gave out. They burned so badly that the rest of this body crumbled and swallowed everyone else whole. My breath claws itself out of my throat for the last time and my mother pretends she does not see the flames licking their way down its back. pretends she does not see my car in the driveway. pretends that she keeps this alarm set to wake me up for a reason. It would be selfish of me to think the day I kill myself is the hard one. The world does not end when you do. Time is a vicious predator. But this head is vicious too. It is ruthless and I am terrified. I am always quick to jump the gun, so this time, I do not jump. This time, depression holds it, and I stand with arms wide open, saying I am waiting for a miracle. Saying, Please, help me. Waking up has never been weight lifting before. but now, I am soaked in “I’m sorry” and lifting my dripping body out of this quicksand heartbreak, this tornado of “what if”. I do not know if this is blood or rain anymore but I am too heavy to care. Too much of a glass weight that will break. That already has, somewhere. And I don’t know much, but I do know this. After it happens, My brother sleeps in my parents’ bed but does not actually ever fall asleep. My mother forgets what it feels like to stop crying. My father does not know how to delete my voicemails, and whether or not that is because he is too old and not tech savvy enough or too stubborn he will never say. My sister still calls me on December first- “Happy birthday. My wish this year is for you to come home.” And so I wake up and I wring myself out and I come home. I do. I do.

[jillianbowe-blog]

I Love You (Whatever That Means)

On our way out of IHOP at what must be 11:30PM, you stop me. You pull out a notebook and write a thank you note to the waiter. Laughing, embarrassed, you tell me you carry it around for these moments. Inevitably, I wonder if I should start doing the same to catch all of the times when the world stops moving around you. And I consider myself lucky that it is dark, because I am looking at you like you are the universe, and somehow I don’t think you notice. and I’m not trying to say anything, but I’ve never seen you and the entire universe in the same room. Part of that may be because I don’t see anything else when I’m with you. I digress. You love with little things. “I know I don’t have to. I want to.” “Did you eat today?” “Good morning, I love you, in case you forgot.” And there are days that I do. There are days when I am more mouse than I am mousetrap, more radio static than I am song- all shudder and no music. I don’t know when I stopped muting love songs but I know that I play my radio a little prouder now, a little louder, you got me feeling like a playlist that lasts an entire car trip across the country. There’s this song that doesn’t exist yet that has your voice in every lyric. I picture you singing it in my passenger’s seat. It’s my favorite one. And I don’t know if love is real, but I do know I used to be afraid of thunderstorms. Now, I think of you every time it rains and I smile. I don’t know the difference between loving and being in love, but I do know I am not an easy either-of-those-things. I do know I am saving the second one for when I can trust these dollar store legs to hold me, I do know there’s a scar on the right side of my chest that reminds me I should not have made it this far, and a scar on the inside of my heart that reminds me of all the times I did not want to, but here I am. Here you are. And god, am I lucky. I would not want it any other way. I know that my stomach has gotten really good at skydiving, because every time you kiss me, I can feel it falling, and falling, and falling and falling and I am falling. And even though sometimes you may feel like there are more days with thunderclouds than clear skies, I have an umbrella that is big enough for the both of us. I will jump in the puddles and sing in the rain and remind you that there is no amount of water that can drown something worth swimming for. There is no amount of car crash that will break something worth driving for, and you are an open road. You are every green light on the way home. I suppose what I am trying to say is, you make me feel like I am dancing underwater and I don’t care that I can’t breathe. You make me feel like I am covered in Christmas lights. You make me feel like there is a whole solar system in a girl who lives ten minutes from my house, who loves the color purple, fall weather, and coffee ice cream. You are what city lights at night would feel like if you could hold all of them at once. But you can’t, and I suppose you are like city lights. No matter how often I try to describe to you what you are, I cannot carry all of you in my words at once. You are every word I have never been able to write. Somehow, you have left the poet speechless. I cannot pretend that that does not frustrate me. And I also can’t pretend I’m not terrified. I can’t pretend that glass does not shatter just because it is beautiful. I can’t pretend that I haven’t written more heartbreak poems than I have grocery lists, but I can tell you that you are my favorite poem. You are my happiest tomorrow, my favorite good morning, my Northern Lights after years of searching for the sun in the middle of the night. So when I tell you I love you, I mean I am terrified. I mean I stopped believing in love, and then I met you. Thank you. For everything.

[jillianbowe-blog]

heartbreak as a drug dealer

i meet him (because, of course, he is a man- mid twenties, thin - with ribs sticking out like park benches - and yellow-toothed) in the dark at first. i go when no one is looking, so that i do not feel guilty for taking what he gives me. i tell myself this is just temporary; i will stop seeing him soon and then i can pretend i do not know him. weeks knock on months's door and suddenly i am knocking on his, again, in the middle of the day. he swings his door open, piss drunk, breath reeking of vomit, wife beater hanging off his left shoulder and i don't think he notices let alone cares, and i ask him when the last time he showered was. he grumbles back a "no", frowns, then, an "i don't know" and i hear my voice. i blink and i see myself standing there: piss drunk, vomit-breathed, bare-shouldered (and uncaring). this man (middle-aged, thin, yellow-toothed) has started to look a lot like a mirror. i reach out and close the screen door, still able to see him, or me, or this mirror collapse and i am grateful, finally, that i have a knack for shattering.

[jillianbowe-blog]

there is a stop sign in my best friend's neighborhood that i blow through every time i leave her house past sunset. tonight, it is 10:34pm. i do my best to direct my attention forward, going 40 mph down a neighborhood street... i am afraid of driving in the dark. even though i always check the backseat before i leave, i am convinced every time there is someone back there i didn't look hard enough for. i guess i'm not afraid of the dark; i'm afraid of what's in it. but here i am - 55 miles left in my gas tank, an irrational fear of the things i cannot see when i am facing forward, and a broken car radio - passing my street to keep driving instead of going home. immediately, i know where my stubborn lead-heavy foot is taking me, and i am no longer driving the one driving the car. i am just taking a backseat to my bad memories and the smell of vodka on my first kiss's breath. when i pass by your house, the silence the broken car radio is sputtering feels heavy. i think i see someone's hands that must be my own grip the wheel tighter, til the knuckles look like candle wax, and i swear, i smell the burning. i suddenly hope there is someone in my backseat. i hope they are sharpening their knife to kill me. i want to die on your porch- show you what it feels like to love you. show you that blood is still thick even when it is nighttime. i want you to see what happened every day you did not love me back. i guess i am the only one from when we were together that knows the feeling. i guess he never had to worry about that, even though he only fucked you, never made love- i'm not sure when you stopped loving me. i only know when you stopped pretending. once, you told me you were afraid of losing me and i should've said, "me too." i think it's too late for either of us to find my ignored stop sign of a body no matter how many sunrises we wait for. my heart says to slam on the breaks. says, it is sick of living life inches above a pot of boiling water. says, fuck your 53 miles til empty, pushes through my ribcage like it is rising from a graveyard. i was not afraid of your "i love you"s, i was afraid of what was in them. and that is why i check the backseat for things i do not notice until it is too late. so i try to keep my heart from walking through your front door, try to stop it from looking at your hands and recognizing the lines in your palms. and it feels like visiting a childhood home after it is not yours anymore. even though there is new wallpaper in the first floor bathroom, and dog hair on a couch you don't recognize, everything looks familiar. you catch yourself calling it home as you walk out the front door. hurting for you just feels like home now. but I force my heart to pack its bags, make my lungs learn to breathe air that doesn't taste like suburban heartache, push my stomach to walk out the door without falling down the stairs, and i keep driving. my headlights drag my car forward. as i get further away from your house, 50 miles til empty doesn't feel like a death sentence anymore, and i only check the backseat twice on the way home (once for you and once for your apology). so when you call me, 13 months after our breakup, and over 26 months since the first time you cheated on me, and you tell me you need me, i'll laugh, and say "me too." and this time, tonight, at 10:56pm, i pull into my garage. i put my car in park, and tell myself, that finally, I am home.

[jillianbowe-blog]

hypnosis I. it is sophomore year, but to me, that means nothing. i measure time in either the space between the times i tell you i love you or in death dates that never come. but i can't remember what those first words feel like in my mouth anymore so instead, i tell you i'm sorry. and i know it isn't the same. i know your mind does not register apology as forgiveness because it's not. i spend months convincing myself it is. but what can i say? i am a hopeless romantic (minus the romantic part). hypnosis II. it is senior year. i look at the clock and pretend i don't see your face (or anything at all) because i am sick of time passing while i am all broken hourglass and sand and heartbreak. i tell myself to forget how to hurt and i think you hear me, somehow, even though i never said it out loud. and i watch you pull a piece of glass from your neck and put it back where it was on my hourglass body and the blood stings just a little bit. you do not love me anymore. but it is my fault for wasting my time in "i'm sorry" instead of "i love you"; and that is the price you pay for being sand in a world full of open hands.