My Brain Is One Run On Sentence and If I Could Get Off This Train I Would But for Now I’ll Write It Down

Image Description: There is a pile of photos, years of memories, childhood, and family. There are scrapbooks, a candle, a plastic baby doll, and flowers lying about. 

And I’ll never understand why I attract those like your kind. Maybe it’s because my mother hasn’t said she’s sorry and I tend to look for apologies more often than they look for me. Maybe, like the opening of a wound, tender love hurts just as much and I had a dream about you a while ago that I couldn’t quite remember when I woke up I felt an emptiness between my arms and I grieved the entire day. Sometimes I feel pathetic and puffy-eyed about such small insignificant things that I forget to breathe and I lose my footing but then I remember it’s only November. I had a fight with my mother one night in September it made me realize I am no longer an extension of what’s been and it’s a paralyzing feeling being in between what’s outgrowing me and what wants to come in. I think of you, and there is a familiar hunger my throat contracts because I didn’t get to scream at you, the way I can scream at my mother. I scream at my mother because even though it hurts, I know she’ll never leave after saying— even when it’s all my fault. But can you touch me before the night ends? Can you set aside the circumstances and can we kiss and just let it be what it needs to be? What I want it to be. Can we just kiss and have that kiss just be that, can you serenade love words into my mouth as we kiss, and after can we have a smoke, and then can you tender my goodbye and can we be kind and have it not mean anything at all? Other than it just being what it was, just kiss. 

I know it sounds awful but can you give purpose to my parents’ making of me? And none of this is about— it’s everything that was before. I want to bleed a new woman out of me and I want to have a kiss and let it just be a kiss because I’m too apathetic about your face and I don’t want your feelings or anything that has to do with you at all really. I want to be content with being still and I want to sit beside people that care and I want to hear my grandmother’s laugh in the living room and see that sterling silver smile I want to wash my sheets and get into bed and not worry about all the messes I’ve made and I want to have a good dream and wake up and feel sunlight on my skin. I don’t want sincerity or consolation or explanation. So can it just be a good kiss and can I just enjoy your body and can we, please can we just? And if the lies I haven’t told spill from my lips onto yours when they touch can you just stay quiet, and let me have a moment. A moment alone, a moment of just me but with you so can we just kiss and touch and not have it be anything at all? To see myself in your eyes and know it’s just me, this is just me; I can only be me, with you, not there, me. I forget who I am when it feels good, so let it be half good. When you’re gone I can go over it in my head, make myself believe I thought you were better than that, and I batter myself; am I better than that? Am I too selfish? Too volatile? I’m too tired, so just give me one fragmentary moment away from everything else, then I will forget your name. Then I can come back to me, she needs it more than anyone. Because this cold body is mechanizing an idle heart, but a kiss is just a kiss.  

And the days are shorter now, so my patience is running low. I won’t dare to remember how you held my hands nice n soft, or the song you once played for me it wasn’t the first time slow strumming deceiving fingers on a guitar have failed to see and I won’t try to understand what any of it meant because for me it’s all really simple that some moments are meant to suffocate in the same breath they are born, and I don’t have enough time to keep track how many stupid lost memories tread behind, sorry for not enjoying you I was too busy dreading the end of this potential and there was a day I cried in your bed and it was so quiet had to stop myself from bathing tears on your pillow but you didn’t even notice and you’d never understand I just couldn’t see how I’d gotten here, again, I confused being emotional with vulnerability and when will I ever have the right timing with words when I open my mouth my mind goes blank but everything passes in time and I need to remind myself that I invented another you and we won’t ever get along and this is all part of a bigger scheme that’s leading me to something else I’ll learn to comprehend when the time comes but for now I’ll let it sink until it seeps out I’ve been told temporary discomfort is better than holding on and it’s not that I even want that it’s just the process of and I am learning it’s the almost-somethings that sting and ironically pleasure persists in what-ifs more than what your presence ever brought me and I can’t spend another night undoing myself over anything that’s decayed because this life never ends and there is not enough time and who gets to decide when my selfishness will finally be satisfied and solace is found where I last left it so I’ll go over there in that corner of my mind and I’ll find peace with the fact that I’ll never have to be the one to console you. And there are no more last words, no more sorry anythings, so if I embrace this feeling maybe it will evaporate before I can remember how to casually hello if I run into you again and none of this has to be as significant as I make it out to be but the truth is I’d never tell anyone how much any of this hurt because I have been brought up to believe pain is futile and I can’t be so sensitive so maybe every end compiles onto the one before but I can’t stick my arm in to reach for what caused all of this because there’s another now and no matter what my brain is a train moving forward I don’t have enough time to stop and cry and rethink anything. And what a waste.