Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
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.
altogether too empty to really quite exist. not pretty enough to make people stop and stare but just attractive enough to make a boy fall for the spark in my eyes. I feel like half a person, a waxing gibbous moon. had the potential to be something wonderful. don’t want to be normal or ordinary but I really am nothing special. that’s the curse of living I guess. you gotta live with the fact that you won’t be an elvis or a bowie or a keats.
I write about love obsessively but how can I call myself a poet and not find a muse in our love? in your eyes? or in your kisses?
you, my love, are Michaelangelo’s david (your head turned to the sea and your eyes alive, god you are art in the skin of a man), Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (the way your smile tells me things your words could never, the way I can’t help but stop and stare whenever your lips turn into a crescent moon), Van gogh’s sunflowers (blonde hair and green eyes, the colour palette of a man driven by the madness of love. you should sit in a gallery, honey. you’re the most beautiful thing these eyes ever laid on).
beings like you inspire the most wonderful art. and although i do not create the most beautiful words or the most stunning paintings, I am curled up in the corner thinking of you. and all my fingers can do is write. and write and write.
this is how Michaelangelo felt in the chapel, painting stories of god and trying to bring this divinity to the earth.
this is how da Vinci felt, drawing the smile of a woman he had only seen in passing. her beauty seared her into his brain, how could he not make art out of her face and call it a masterpiece?
and this is how Van Gogh felt, broken by the world but seeing all the wonder of nature in his lover’s eyes, deciding there are good things if only she exists.
you, my dear, are art. nothing less.
summer in the city drenches everything in this unbearable sticky heat,
I am here in bed,
thinking about my blue eyed boy:
the sunlight washing over anything,
a daydream in reality,
all this harshness dipped in gold.
isn’t life just misery. and mortality. and suffering.
isn’t this mangled body so tired of dragging itself forward,
waiting for the next trauma to almost-cripple it.
but like the sunlight my blue eyed boy pours his warmth over everything,
my own pocket of the galaxy,
and his sun rays touch me like nothing else has ever touched me before.
summer sticks to him,
summer sticks to me.
and all this sweaty passion is
so strong I feel it from the other side of the universe.
for someone that feels empty a lot of the time, I’m sure able to give and give and give. it’s my nastiest and most damaging habit. maybe that’s why I have such a fascination with sandcastles and other temporary things, the way I commit all my time to a couple of fleeting moments. strange that I can always feel the storm before it hits, the way the air sticks to my body like ghosts. don’t I lose love like eyelashes. don’t I hold love like a hoarder. this little light lady is all smoke and no flame.
he makes me laugh, head thrown back and eyes alive with happiness. he asks me to come closer when we sleep together, squeezes my hips and grins. he tells me I look beautiful in a black dress and heels with my hair messy and tangled but says he knows I’d look beautiful in anything anyway. he kisses my neck and my thighs and my hands and says “baby, you’re the most lovely thing my body has ever loved”. touches me in a way that makes me think, god even the sun hasn’t spilled her light on me like this.
I can’t tell you what it feels like, to have a boy blush when I kiss him, no memorised pick up lines, sauve attitude or cocky mannerisms. he’s so honest, so raw and passionate. so in love. so in love with me.
I used to think love was this anxiety-inducing dance for two, where everything had to be absolutely perfect. where things are painful and frustrating. where I have to chase and beg and call and entertain and cry and lose. always lose. but he’s right here now, sleeping on my shoulder. soft and sweet, with his arms around me.
and I think he’s going to stay.
cherry picking things to smile about this summer. I need these things to keep going. all this love, food, films, songs...I grin, take big bites until I have a mouthful of sweetness. things are bad again. I’m tired and sad and slow all over again. everything that used to be colourful is grey and dark, depression is the fog that covers everything. but it’ll get better. I know it. with all this love and art and music, I’ll feel alive again.
something so quiet about his kiss, so secretive. his mouth wide open, swallowing truths and honey and hushed moans. hands that render me silent to everything, weak at the knees and falling head first into something so soft. something that’ll break my fall. passionate love that is not loud or arrogant. a love that beckons me towards it with little more than a whisper.
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.
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.
Lover, I know I’m such an excessive woman. I bleed so many emotions, each as destructive as the last. I breathe in love and exhale anxiety, infecting everything around me with paranoia and insecurity. I bleed scarlet angry and drink bluesy sadness, so much pain and turmoil, so much misplaced passion.
It must be so overwhelming to be mine, must be like loving a charred forest that doesn’t know how to trust the sun again, mistakes warmth for destruction. Lover, please leave if you find yourself crumbling under the weight of all that has broken me. I know I’m too much and that I’ve painted the inside of your heart in splatters of ugly colours, regurgitated trauma.
But you say no. You tell my ghosts that if they’re staying, then that they’d better make room. You hold me until I am strong enough to walk again, kiss me until all the loss tastes like strength. Tell me that the inside of your heart is a masterpiece now, all those colours look so pretty. You hold up a mirror to it and say look, how can all this look anything less but human.
A love so unconditional, so relentless in its support. How lucky I am, lover, to call you my own.
things my abuser has tried to take away from me but failed:
1) Love in the form of sunflowers and surprise dinners and intertwined fingers. Romance and deep kisses, warm and safe. Dancing and giggling with him to Lily Allen. Kissing him and wondering what I did to deserve a body so soft, a love so raw and honest.
2) Love in the form of looking after this heavy body, even when it doesn’t look after me back. Face masks, showers and brushing through my matted hair, knotted like a unkempt garden. Dragging myself to therapy and loving all the charred parts of me. Loving me flawed, loving me regardless, loving me unconditionally, loving the me that survived.
3) Love in the form of a best friend. Nights spent sleeping next to her, nights spent crying into her lap, nights spent singing at the top of our lungs. She loves me silently, knows me when I’m down, knows me when I’m up. She doesn’t love me different, even with all the flaws.
4) Love in the form of family, with their misguided love and tentative support. Love in the form of my mother’s perfume and food she tells me to eat even when I feel I don’t deserve it. Weeks spent in hospital, bringing me my favourite food in the ward. Love in the form of her imperfection and how I wouldn’t change it for the world.
5) Love in the form of music, of dancing around in my room to the anthems of my youth. Of belting it out as loud as my lungs will allow. Songs I’ve cried to, laughed to, kissed to, lost to. Songs that held me up and gave a melody to all the hurt.
6) Love in the form of the poet in me. On my best days, she is all that I am. On my worst days, she is all that I want to be.
7) Love in the form of hope. A love that screams I made it. A love that believes it happened. Recovery has finally, finally begun to taste sweet.
he dreams of wide eyes and rainbow skies, his blonde hair fanned out against the pillow like a crown of gold. my angel, my Icarus, my blue-eyed lover. what must I do to make you stay? how hard must I wish to meet those eyes in the morning?
midnight, baby. I’ll meet you tonight in our dreams. I’ll meet you in the garrets of a fairy palace. I’ll meet you in a field of daisies, a cave of diamonds. I’ll meet you in the nightmares and the dreams. I’ll meet you in the in between.
sleepy eyed lover, with you’re soft hands and marshmallow heart. Aren’t you’re the most beautiful thing this mangled body ever loved.