We try to love what cannot be tamed. Wild horses,

vodka in shapely bottles, angry men and the things
they carry. We have done what we could. They say
anything they can to justify leaving. That we are
always sad. That we have let our hearts burn out
for petty things. That we are too fragile. That we are to selfless.

That we are too dependent.

They accuse us of being too sad to love. 

We’re not sure where we’ve learned
this, to want the things we know we can’t have. 

Chances are,
we are all the same, riding high on velvet blue nights.
Our weaknesses have names and phone numbers,
addresses we can send letters to,
describing our love and poetry. We are praying for sixteen again,
for clear skin and boys
who asked for permission before holding our hands. They say
they can find us by our cheekbones, that they are
small, miraculous sources of light. 

Sometimes we’re safe
but usually we’re not. 

The crime scene tape
should have been our first clue.

I don’t want to talk to him
but his voice is still the only thing that soothes me.
My body feels like a waiting room and I’ve already
tried pills, vodka and blades. Mascara piled on so thick
I can barely open my eyelids but the thing is,
I don’t want to see. You tried to love me once
and ended up calling me a damsel in distress.
I really miss you but I still haven’t
told my therapist. Sometimes it’s nice just to have
someone to talk to, you know? When I’m afraid
I sleep with the television on, volume high
so that the voices in my head won't bother me. Everything
is just static. I am okay. I. Am. Okay. I-am, okay.
I text people and tell them about all the fun I'm having but 

you're the first person I wanna talk to when I get a paper cut.
I sometimes compare my body to a junkyard
and I find bits of scrap metal beneath my bed
from people who break their promises. Maybe
love ruins you a little bit. Maybe we don’t care.
We are so young to hate everything so much.
We can recite the periodic table from memory
but still can’t quite believe it when they say
that they love us, too.

Even from far away

you could see it

they were drunk

but not from any type of beverage.

they were drunk off each other

the way they laughed

the way they kept sneaking glances

they way they curled into each other

with a nervousness behind

subtle excitement

even from far away

you could see it

they found each other

utterly intoxicating

It's not that I dont love, It's that I do...

"it’s not that i don’t love you.
it’s the sound i heard when i was 9 and my mom slammed the front door so hard behind her i swear to god it shook the whole house. for the rest of the years, i watched my father break his teeth on vodka bottles. i think he stopped breathing when she left. i think part of him died. i think she took his heart with her when she walked out. his chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills.
it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s all the blood in the sink.
it’s the night that my dad spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if i was going to be okay, after the boy i loved, didn’t love me anymore. it’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. so much blood.
it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s the time that i had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. i swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks.
i think when you love someone, it never really goes away. it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s the six weeks we had a substitute in english because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. when she came back she was smiling. but her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. and sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. nothing ever goes back to how it was. i got an a in english that year. i think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays.
it’s not that i don’t love you.
it’s that i do."

Some things are better left unsaid...

"Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t say: But it was everything then."

 —Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid

~ Auriel H. ~

Don't Ever Say Goodbye

It was a hot winter morning. Sana stood on the balcony, sipping her cup of tea. She’d been getting nightmares lately, dreams she could not even begin to understand. It was the same vision night after night.

“I’m telling you, I’m fine, baby.” Ishaan purred in her ear, handling the steering wheel a little too fast.
 
She was scared. “Just concentrate on the road, Ish. I’m late. And you’re drunk.” She said anxiously.

“Which doesn’t help.”

He almost laughed. “You’re fine. As long as we’re together, nothing’s going to happen.”

Her heart skipped a beat. What could you say to that?

“I love you.” She simply said.

He stared at her for what seemed like forever. He shifted his eyes from the road and simply looked at her, drinking her in. “I love you.”

There was a loud sound every time and then complete darkness. She’d wake up every night with sweat on her face.
 
It had been more than a year since Ishaan had left her life. From everything to nothing. No calls, no texts, nothing. He just disappeared. And the worst part was, they had it all. They were amazing together. What he did to her, no one else could. And once he left, he left a hole in her heart. She tried dating again, but somehow nothing ever worked out. Nobody was ever good enough. She just wanted him. But she didn’t know where he was. He left without saying goodbye. That’s what hurt the most. More than all the questions in her mind. She kept wondering, ‘Was I that easy to give up?’

Ishaan and Sana had a complicated story of their own. He was the popular jock, she was the debating girl.

And yet they saw in each other, what no one else ever did. He saw her as someone who wasn’t afraid of taking risks, someone who didn’t simply want to accept things as they were, and someone who wanted to leave a little bit of herself in the world. She saw him as someone who was misunderstood, someone with issues, someone damaged who could be saved. And for that, they loved each other.

She would always be hard on herself. She’d always think that she was unworthy of happiness. While all her friends were in relationships, she had accepted the fact that she wasn’t meant for love. But then Ishaan came into her life.

 It wasn’t love at first sight. Actually, it was anything but that. She was asked to write an article on the football match for the team he was captaining. She didn’t like him at first glance. I mean sure, he was good looking, but a guy’s got to be more than that, right? He was cocky, rude and a little too full of himself. It was only later that she realised that that was just pretence.

 He wasn’t cocky; he was just proud. He wasn’t rude; he just wasn’t much of a talker, and he wasn’t too full of himself; he was just awkward during conversations. They never wanted to display their love in public. They thought that would cheapen their love. In fact, love wasn’t the right word. It was too little, too casual and too insufficient to capture what they shared. What they had was way more than that. They discovered so much about each other that sometimes they’d just forget about everything else. When they were together, everything else ceased to matter. She was his. He was hers. And deep inside, they both knew they’d last forever.

It was last New Year’s when it had happened. She had a deadline to reach home and she was already late. She was pulling Ishaan to take her home, but he was already drunk.

He had not shifted his gaze from the road for one minute, when a truck hit their car and changed their lives forever.

Yes. Her worst nightmare occurred one and a half years back, and yet Sana lives the same day on repeat, again and again.