Intentions

There are days when I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. I look at the thinned-out black horizons that separate the sunrises and sunsets of the words that could see morning or never step out of the shadows. The broken railroad tracks over words underserving. Undeserving of who, I don't know. Maybe my future self? The same girl who wants to believe in the good of everything except her own fortune and ability.

It's hard to swallow that my biggest fear is a few moments from where I am now. That I'll wake up and set fire to who I was  before I put my head to my pillow. Sometimes I can't stand finding myself splattered across a page, pathetically claiming to have felt things and been a part of something that will periodically crawl back into the bottom of the kettle and ignite the next time I'm shown the slightest bit of heat.

The sound of ballpoint turning into the ticking of the extended arm of an analogue race.
A word.
Words.
An underground stream of dirtied sentences.
They show up sometimes without digging, sometimes only after finding the roots of century-old trees wrapped around my neck.

I hate words. I can't live without them. I hate words but if you asked me where I was from, I'd dive into worlds made up of previously scribbled tales from when I was scared, when I thought I had found love, how I had burned myself so many times before and how I'd imagined my future to be something everyone would read about.

Truth is, I read my own writing in song form but still find them unworthy of a harmony. Maybe all we are is a sad song, subjectively made positive by the five year old girl whose joy is found in licking the gaps between her fingers after eating ice cream without a spoon. That girl used to be you and maybe she used to be me, only now we couldn't bear being caught with our tongues out. And I can't bear the thought of writing another word.

Because I hate words. I hate words but I can't stop writing them. I look at my pen and I see myself edging towards you the way the ink makes its way to the page end. You're my punctuation; the comma in my breathing, the ellipsis in my hesitation to touch your hand. I could do with a world without fullstops but I think I'd miss the moments just before you've decided what words to say, the words you hope won't hurt me, but the words that are as inevitable as the fullstop that follows them.

Sometimes I sit down in front of my notebook, full of intentions. "This time I won't write about her," and sometimes I'll make it halfway to the bottom having kept my promise. But you're there, pole dancing around my 'L's and falling over my 'I's and you're racing my pen to the end of the page.

You don't have to run. We both know you'll win.

A Letter To My Darling - No.2

Let me start by telling you how beautiful you are. Wonderfully beautiful. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

I woke up with a heavy heart this morning. I had spent the night dreaming of you but not once would you let me see your face. I chased you around corners and through crowds to no avail. And then I thought that it was a sign, that I wasn't worthy, that I was just a girl who had words to offer in the place of kisses.

I could sit and look at your name on my screen all night but that wouldn't change anything. I'd think of things to say like how you make things better, even the taste of tea, or how I've had the impulse to buy a ticket home and remind you of our shaky breath the first time we kissed in your car. I keep thinking of what you said last night, how you wish you could reply without feeling bad and that broke my heart. Surely we should be allowed to say what's in our heart?

And then I realise I've said too much, like I always do, because self restraint is not something I can associate with you. No, when I think of you, I think of how we can find magic in the most peculiar of places. How we shouldn't brush something off before we've gotten to know it, the way you've gotten to know me and found comfort in my already flawed way of thinking. That means the world to me by the way, so thank you.

You really are beautiful. I can't stop picturing the way your eyes smiled whenever we found each other in the crowd and how our fingers weren't happy unless they were tied together. I'd spend my life sailing just to learn how to knot up our souls so no one could separate me from you.

I'm sorry your world is riddled with hurt and confusion. 
I'm sorry that this letter is drenched in melancholy.
But mostly, I'm sorry that I couldn't be saying this to your face.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. I can only hope that the sun will shine for you always.

Yours faithfully,
Jenique

A Letter To My Darling

Today I thought of you 118 times today. I know that because each time I had to remember to breathe. Then I thought about the number 118 and how the 1s stood side by side and then I remembered when you stood behind me and I could feel your breath on my shoulder. I liked the way they were equal, the way I imagined our souls to be. Sometimes You would describe a feeling and I could feel the way your heart was beating as if it were in my own chest.

Then I thought about the number 8 and how it was the most complete number I could think of. "You've made me feel more whole than I've felt in a long time," I remember those words and the night you said them and how you turned my world into the number 8 just by being in it. Now I see you, me, I see us, in every 8. Turned to the side, a symbol on infinity, the number of words I'd write for you until you came back to me.

So many moments passed that I wanted to share with you today. The way the weather changed almost as many times as I thought of you. How I wish I was sitting next to you on a couch while the rain kissed the windowsill and then how I wish we were walking through a park while we held hands and the Sun would tell us that happiness was something we had found in each other.

There was a spectacular moment on my ride home. As I turned onto the downhill, the perfect song came on and the clouds couldn't contain their secrets anymore and spilt their heartache around me. The moment their tears touched my face, I wasn't scared anymore, somehow I knew that things would work out and my feelings for you grew seven fold while I let go of the handles and trusted the winds to carry me to you. God, I wish that road didn't have to end.

But everything must end, the song, the rain, this letter.
We can't let that discourage us. We have to keep hope in our hearts that the world is full of spectacular moments and I have to keep hope that I will get to kiss you again.

Try not go to bed with a heavy heart tonight, you're the loveliest thing I've ever seen.

Yours faithfully,
Jenique

i have learned

I have learned that free will is still the most powerful force. You can't change it.
I have learned that you can make the same mistake over and over and still not take a lesson from it.
I have learned that being vulnerable isn't the same as being romantic.
I have learned that love follows the law of gravity - you can fall fast but it'll take longer to get up.
I have learned that words can fix a broken heart but they can't claim it afterwards.
I have learned that silence between two people can mean a number of things. Don't mistake it for something it's not.
I have learned that cars are better when travelling at high speeds.
I have learned that some playlists should never be burned.
I have learned that just because someone holds tight onto you, it doesn't mean they won't let you go.
I have learned that distance doesn't mean they'll be farther from your thoughts.
I have learned that you can find traces of her in every song.
I have learned that sometimes it's better to write about love than to feel it.
I have learned that happiness is fleeting.
I have learned that "but" can break your heart.
I have learned that just because you've stopped crying for two years, doesn't mean you have stopped for good.
I have learned that stolen kisses always come at a price.
I have learned that when you think something is too good to be true, it is, so run.

Run as fast as you can.

I swallowed the ocean in search of her beneath the waves. Now water spills from my fingertips and it gargles at the back of my throat and my shoes are weighed down like boats that lost the wind that used to fill their sails. "There goes that girl with the tidal wave heart," I hear them say.

My anchor catching on memories as I drag it through islands of good intentions. I suddenly realise that I've been looking in the wrong place, only to turn my head up to see her ablaze in the sky. "But how do I get to her?" I ask, "you can't," they say, "you were made to sink."

Continuum

I'm not even sure if this makes sense but I wrote it anyway and then posted it here and now you're reading it. Cool.

***


I don’t know why people are so scared of it.

Silence.

I think that’s where we discovered each other. In the silence.

She sat there, pouting her lips at the floor and I grew to learn that she did this when she was content, not when she was thinking of things to say.

So I sat there too, with my hand over hers, but with my fingers slipped between hers like keys trying to find the right lock.

I didn’t have to look at her, her face was stitched into the bedding of my mind and the sheets tied a rope down my spine – the first place I’d feel her presence when she invited herself in.

I’d never known anyone to be so there, so present in their being that you’d imagine her heart to be a forest – static but ever-growing – and I was sure that I could count the seconds between the blinking of her eyelids even with my eyes closed.

Everything she did echoed onto whoever was near her. People blissfully ignorant in their freedom of choice but they had no idea that it was no choice of theirs at all. They were the ripples of things she had done and when she stood still, you could hear the purpose escape them.

That’s why I could live in her silence. Because it was more than the absence of sound, it was the world re-wiring itself to fit our moments. How selfish of me to keep them all from their intentions, but how lovely she is, much too lovely for me to change that now.

The truth is, I’d watch the world crumble so I could hold onto this continuum of her.

Titanic by Andrea Gibson

I grew up in the town that received the first distress signal
saying the Titanic was going down.
It was the only thing we were ever known for.
In face, we prided ourselves on our failure to save the sinking
which is maybe part of the reason I prided myself
on drinking my first fifth of whiskey at eleven years old.
It’s cold where I come from.
I learned to drown young.

At fourteen I showed up to my 8am high school art class so drunk
my art teacher took a month long sabbatical to reevaluate
her ability to make the world a better place.
When she returned she had a face like a gravestone
with an already-passed death date.
I sometimes wonder if I killed her.

Which is maybe part of the reason
I sometimes paint this world prettier than it is.
Have you ever had the feeling you owe somebody somewhere
a really good reason to live?
To grow old?
To be ninety-eight-and-a-half
with a laugh like broken glass
so whenever folks walk barefoot
they’ll get hidden pieces embedded in their souls?


I’ve spent too many years
sewing my tears together with thread
and hanging them like Christmas lights,
spent too many nights watching the sunset
on the edge of a knife’s glint
to wanna let myself or anybody else drown anymore
so I call this poem shore
that when the message in the bottle finally arrives
it’s not gonna ask why't broke us in half
it’s gonna ask why we survived

Why did Rumi dance when his beloved died?
Why did children search Hiroshima’s sky for the moon
when their wounds were still open as hope’s suicide note,
when the clouds were still bleeding?
Why did Frida Kahlo sculpt a paintbrush from her scars?

My mother says the thing about wheelchairs
is they keep you looking up.
Says forest may be gorgeous
but there’s nothing more alive
than a tree growing in a cemetary
and sometimes it’s the cup that’s half empty
that fills the heart so full
it could pull a bow
above the strings of a row of combat boots
and make them sing like a pair of lovers calling each other’s names
into the echo of the Grand Canyon

Three years ago my niece’s eyes
kept the needle from my sister’s veins
for the very first time.
If I could collect that day,
the sweat from her shaking palms
the cramps knotting like a noose in her gut
I would have the stuff of monarchs taking flight,
of nights when the smoke of burning flags
float across our borders like a kiss.

It hit 170 degrees in the locked trailer of the truck
when the women locked hands and sang so hard
the Texas desert shook
like the hearts of the folks
who would find them still alive.

Why did Rumi dance?
We have cried so hard our tears have left scars on our cheekbones,
but who finds their way home by short cuts?
You wrote your first song on  homophobe’s fist.
She wrote her first poem on her mother’s dying wish.

Sometimes the deepest breaths
are pulled from the bottom of the ocean floor
and if the soul is a mosaic of all our broken pieces
I won’t shine my rusted edges.
I’ll just meet you on shore.

Dark

I'm sitting in the dark.

The kind of darkness where you aren't sure if your eyes are open or closed. But I already know that I'm not alone. I can feel your closeness but I'm not afraid of you. Instead, my hands yearn for you like you're the buoy that will save me from this lithium.

And there it is, the awakening of skin on skin and I'm keeping myself from melting around you.

We don't say anything but the darkness is shifted by your smile and somehow I'm home. Here in the nothingness, I've been born for the first time under your fingertips.

But we're joined by someone else and although I'm clutching at you, you're pulled away. I've lost you before I got to the chance to have you.

The lights come on and there's no one there.