Waffles

By the time I get to bed and sit in front of the laptop

Unpause the episode of Grace and Frankie I was watching

The butter had melted and formed small golden pools in the

Waffles I made for dinner

And between picking one up and taking a bite

It hits me that I will be lonely, alone for the rest of my life

It's moments like these that I dread the most

Everything seems as good as they will ever get

And then the universe throws a curveball at you

And nothing seems right anymore

Mosquito

There are four mosquitoes inside the mosquito net

Their little bodies heavy, they struggle to fly

Blood, so red against the sunlight

My blood

I clap my hands around them

Blood staining my hands

My blood

What's the point of having your guard up

Building walls around you

If the enemy is already inside

The thief returns

You, the thief,

Return

To take what is mine 

So fucking blind 

To see what it does to me 

But I don't have a fight left in me

So here

Have it all 

What little there is left

Take it and leave me alone

Today we write soppy poems

I don't know if it's because the blues have been bluer

And I've been feeling lonelier than usual

Or if it's because I've been wondering if we should have

Given each other a bit more time

But the songs on the radio remind me of you today

A voice I heard on the street reminds me of you today

The way the clouds look up in the sky, this godawful April heat

A movie ticket from years ago, the colour of my bedroom walls

Everything reminds me of you today

And how I wish

I could love and be loved by you

Today is for missing you

Today is for wishing for the unattainable

And today is for soppy poems.

Disintegrating

I feel like I'm coming undone 

Everything I am is slowly turning into 

Nothing 

I forget how to talk to people 

Responding instead with a word or two 

Touch feels alien, your hand 

Accidentally brushing against mine felt so strange 

People who were constants, strangers now 

I don't know how to love them 

I look at myself in the mirror and wonder 

Who this woman is, staring back 

I don't recognize her 

I don't recognize myself

Love.

Do people our age fall in love?

Or do we outgrow it like we outgrow clothes?

Do we look at comfort and safety and trust and attraction and kindness

And mistake it for love?

Or are these just close enough alternatives

Like vinegar instead of lemon juice and honey instead of sugar?

Does it matter as long as it seems to get the job done?

Things I will never forgive you for

There's a lot you may think I will never forgive you for

But in truth none of them matter

There's one thing and one thing only

That I will never get past

You made the rest of the room disappear

When you walked in and looked at me

For those few moments

It was just you and me

No one else existed

They disappeared into the walls

And since then, no one has looked at me like that

No one has made me feel like the only other person in the room

They barely notice when I am in the room

You showed me what it could be like

And I can never forgive you for it

Love

And as undeserving as you think you are

You do end up getting more than you

Ever thought you would

It just takes a while to realise

Not because they don't love you enough

Because they do

But because it's too good to be true

And you are so damn afraid that

If you accept it, if you embrace it,

If you get used to having so much love in your life

That you would lose it all

That they would leave

But you know they are here to stay because

They don't give up on you

They don't walk away

Just when you think you've lost them like countless others

They take your hand in theirs and

Walk with you

Days like this

And on some days

It is as hard to speak

As it is to place myself

Somewhere in the future

As near as three years

And as far as a decade

On some days

There is no future

And there are no words

There is only the struggle of

Taking it one breath at a time

Love

When I was thirteen, I dismissed the reflection of a gawky kid in the mirror

And told myself that as soon as I turned sixteen

I would be swept off my feet by some boy

When I was fifteen, I told this boy I had a massive crush on that I liked him

And he told me he didn't feel the same way but it didn't matter

Because I stopped liking him a few months later

I turned sixteen and was that an uneventful year

There was no boy who would sweep me off my feet

Not when I was sixteen, not when I was seventeen and not when I was eighteen

But nineteen held a lot of hope and I did get swept off my feet

Only to learn that adult relationships are complicated

And nothing like the fairytales

I nursed my broken heart for the next few years

Slowly realising, or perhaps, slowly accepting that

I would never have this Hollywoodesque romance

Today I had a glimpse of what my future holds

What I would be like when I'm forty or fifty

And it dawned on me that some of us never get their love story

So I will watch as my friends fall in and out of love

I will talk to people I never see again

And I will learn to live with the kind of loneliness some of us take with us to our graves