Jealousy is hard to talk about without feeling
small
Love means having the same conversations over
and over.
Love means listening differently every time.
I’ve spent the last six years unlearning
all the ways my parents communicate.
I still have the same conversations with my
mother everyday.
She asks me when I’m coming home and if
I have a job.
Once a year my mother tells me she’s depressed.
Today I tried watching everyone on the train
like they had a broken heart.
There is something so warlike and old about
the people on the train in the evenings.
You can grow so old just waiting for wars
to end.
My friend who is going through a breakup asks
me to come over and watch him cry so he can
get out of bed sometimes.
He asks me to tell him where the pain is coming
from.
I point to a place and he says that’s right,
it was just getting hard to tell.
His heart breaks so loudly it ruptures mine.
Some love stories do not end like anyone is
right or wrong.
People can just walk away from each other
on their now broken feet.
My friend will stay put until the breakup
is real and bone-shattering.
I can’t say stop because I wouldn’t do
different or haven’t tried.
Love is excessive to the point of survival.
I keep telling my friends I love them in an
effort to give the word love meaning.
Every love story is eventually a ghost story.
I’m reading a gay book that feels like the
words out of my own mouth.
Loving other writers means I’m always left both
jealous and hungry.
Half my anxiety comes from doing things that I
love.
If you stopped eating love stories back to
back you might remember that you aren’t
hungry.
I’m glad my old lover flew away and didn’t
break my feet.
I keep making haunted houses out of people.
Sometimes there isn’t even time to make
new language from one person to the next.
so we say the same words behind their backs
to their faces.
‘I love you’ sounds like ‘I stole this
feeling somewhere’.
In just a year, certain parts of this story
have already become my ghost story.
Many of them are ordinary places like kitchens
and street corners.
When I open my mouth in the Village bats fly
out.
There's something in the air this winter stringing
airplanes and bombs and hearts and money to
a single line of gunpowder.
Every story I’m writing feels terrifying
under its surface.
I have this ungrounded fear that a poem and
a bomb are two parts of the same rupture.
Like we are just watching each other survive
more
And this time its not even beautiful
