Eyelashes and city streets.

You're sitting there, across the room, and you're thinking about me. I can see it in your eyes. I can see it in the way you look at me from under your long eyelashes that I envy. 

You're thinking about me, and that's all there is to it. 

Do you wish we held hands?
Do you wish I hadn't caught you staring?
Do you wish we could stop time, just for a moment?

You're thinking about me, and that's all there is to it. 

I'm reflected in your eyes, and in your thoughts that I want to hear. I want to hear you scream them across the city streets, not caring that I'd hear every word, every secret you hold behind those dark eyelashes.

You're thinking about me, and that's all there is to it. 

Your eyelashes shed wishes and regrets, and I'm on your mind. I don't know how I can tell, I just can. 


You're thinking about me, and that's all there is to it.

The box that holds my heart.

I have a photo of you & I. It's gathering dust on my dresser, face down. I picked it up a few days ago, I blew off the dust and I stared. I just stared. 

Slowly, I let myself look at you. So much taller than me. (But who isn't? Let's be honest here.) It was before my life went crazy, and I didn't know how to make it right again. I still don't know how. 

Then you disappeared, for a while.

Now you're in my life again, and I'm a mess. I'm a different girl who's just trying to pick up the pieces of her life that don't quite fit together anymore. (I don't know if they ever fit in the first place.) I'm shoving all the pieces into my box.

I feel like my world will explode on the first wrong step I take. So many cracks are in sight, it's a wonder it hasn't exploded already. 

I packed up my heart in bubble wrap, and slid it into the box that holds the crooked pieces of my life.

I'm trying to be careful. I'm trying to be cautious, carrying around the box that holds my heart, carrying it high above my head. No one can look at it. No one can open it.

It makes me wonder why I let you have it in the first place.

And why I didn't fight harder to get it back.

Here's news for you: You won't lay hands on it ever again. This time I locked it up, and I swallowed the key. You'll never see it again. (Stop asking.)


And the picture of us? It's in the box, too.
 

Obviously, I'm Jealous.

(This poem isn't actually in our book. But it makes me jealous just the same.)

Personal. by Tony Hoagland. 


Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.

Poems like this make me jealous.

Hate vs. Love

Hate keeps knocking on my door. I keep yelling, "Go away, no one wants you here!" He's sneaking peeks through my window, and I can't shut the blinds because they are broken and unfixable. The curtains burned last week, so that's not an option either. 

I tried to ignore Hate, I tried to ignore the persistent knocking. Hate likes to drive me to insanity. I looked through the tiny peephole in the door, Hate glared back at me, loathing and greed etched on his face. 

Hate was still knocking.

"Aren't your fists getting red?" I asked through the door.

Hate ignored me.

"Don't they ache from your persistence?"

Hate said nothing.

"Go away."

Hate didn't move.

I turned out the lights and went to bed, listening to the beat of my heart and the blood in my veins.

Hate kept knocking.

I didn't fall asleep. I stayed awake, listening to the never-ending knocking. Hate would never give up.

I looked at the clock. The glowing red numbers read 2:43 am. I went to the door, I didn't bother to turn on the light. I threw it open, anger evident in my face, to see Hate had transformed into a beautiful being. And I let him in, charming smile and all. 

He wandered around and cast out Love, who was hiding in my closet. 

Hate decided to stay for a while. 

I asked Hate to leave last week. He won't go. He won't go.

Here's to the nightmares.

The average person falls asleep in 7 minutes. If 7 minutes is the time the average person falls asleep, why are my eyes still open at minute 18? Why are my eyes tired at minute 2? Why doesn't this make sense and why are my dreams not real, but at the same time they're too real?

I thrash around sometimes, and get tangled up in the blankets until I'm immobile. My eyes shoot open and I'm breathing hard and hoping no one is lurking in the shadowy room I call "mine". All my fear comes out in my breath and I feel a scream in my throat, begging to be let out. But I can't let it out, it would wake up everyone and I want to call him, except it's 3:18 am and he probably doesn't want to hear about my nightmares. 

I said stupid things and took things the wrong way and everything is wrong -- maybe that's why I have nightmares. Maybe that's why I don't sleep soundly. (What does that even mean?) I question everything and only know one thing for sure:

I exist. 

That should be obvious, yet it's news to me. It's news that plagues my thought process. 

"We're all friends here, so let's share our inner thoughts." Except I hate 7/8 of the people here, and I don't know the other 1/8. I won't ever share anything with them. I didn't sign up for this. Get me out of here.

If I'm forced to say something, I'll say the only thing I can choke out, "I'm here, I exist, my heart is beating just like yours. But that's all you'll ever know of me."

The clock will tick, the cricket will sing, and after that moment of complete silence, I will receive a standing ovation. 

"Encore! Encore!" they'll sing, hands slapping together in a rush. "Encore!" 

I'll bow and I'll say something else, "My bones might be white, but they might not. I can't say. Only my dreams nightmares will tell me."  

The crowd will scream for more. But I'll walk away, and lose myself in somebody else's daydream. 

I'm tired, my eyes are drooping, and I lay on the floor in my clothes, my mind going at 82 mph, constantly being filled up with worries and hopes and disappointments. 

Maybe one day I'll fall asleep at minute 7, or maybe I won't. Why is it so important to me, anyway?

Love smacked me over the head with a brick, and told me one thing,

"I don't exist."

In the end, this is about courage.

Ah, but fear is a fickle thing. It sneaks in your window, crawls through the key hole, trapping you in your bed, hiding under the blankets. 

Fear makes you cry silent tears, alone. It makes you tremble without reason. It traps you in your thoughts. 

It traps you in the coffin of 'what ifs'.

Fear makes you cringe and bite your nails. The cage you're stranded in, fear built that dear, and it's not coming down on its own. 

Why are you still sitting there? In the center of that cage, in the center of that fear you created?

Yes, you. You created all of it, you made this mess yourself.

You did this to yourself. 

And you can't expect anyone else to fix it for you.

With courage comes freedom darling.