Ruined for Life

There are things they don’t tell you about yourself. Things they don’t tell you because they don’t fit and things they withhold because they can’t accept that they exist. Ignorance is bliss is numbness is annihilation. There are drinks that flow from a bottomless bottle and screams you throw away into an angry wind atop a rocky stone bridge which leads you no where you want to go. Wet with tears. Wet with rain. Wet with sex just before dawn followed by a day too bright, nursing a hangover, the one you swore you’d never let happen after the last time. The last time you saw him. The last time you lost yourself in a dream of colored lights, dancing underneath the moon for all the sweet recklessness of youth. As I write my mouth waters, I curl and bite and chew my bottom lip in anticipation of the story I’m trying so desperately to mold into existence. Have you ever read a line in a book that takes you out into the middle of a darkness you recognize as yourself, and left you there all alone? It’s a little bit romantic isn’t it? The way he took you into the graveyard just over the hills late at night, pulled your hair back and put his fingers in your mouth. God you’re so fucking pretty. Have you ever let a lover go and felt it like knives in your throat, blades to the stomach. What a wretched game this life, this choking on the bones of what you thought was safety but turns out it was a joke and everyone knew it except for you. There are things you do not tell yourself because you can’t bear the way it streaks the sky red behind your swollen eyelids. Staring into the sun until your eyes burn white, you have become a creature unrecognizable to yourself. Too much darkness, too much light, they’ll blind you just the same. And yet. And yet the itching comes and goes, sometimes it’s madness and sometimes it’s just a dizzy cluster of small butterflies thrumming about, just playthings this poetry and prose. Little thunderclouds hovering on a distant horizon, rolling out or rolling in, it’s all the same. In the shadows little fireflies, you can see them breathing as they glow, up and up they go. There is a promise in the touching of faces as two souls collide. There is a secret that nobody knows, which folds in a locket tucked close to my breast. There are the words pressed against my skin like cream colored linen. There is a rose colored beauty in the sunset which is taking down the sky.