“Forever is an incorrect concept” feels like someone replaced my stomach with a black hole and gave me a lobotomy.

My tears are mine.
You can’t take them from me
like you can’t close a dam once it’s broken
because I am too strong
for you.
I may shut myself up
because you’ll drown in me
but if you try to quell me
one more time
I’m going to show you
that I am beautiful
but I do not trickle or hum or flow.
I crash and roar
and obliterate concrete like limestone.
I am a child
of the ocean.
I am no child of yours.

There’s a well inside me
that plunges to the center of the Earth.
I am the axis
with a universe churning in me.
The water spills from my throat
and thunders on your roof.
I long to make your body 90% water
so your cells rupture
because you’re hypotonic
with me.

In these next few months, the person I love most in the world will go to college, I will travel to Europe and get a job and an internship and write and write and write. There is a sweet sickness that comes with the rapidly approaching liberty, like poison gas coming at me like a bullet train. And it’s sick of me, as well, but the deliciousness of it all consumes me more than the nausea. The idea of the hunger and spilling hot pain excites me as much as any hallucination of Yale or womanhood. We look at our lives from third person and are able to project the arc of our stories ahead of us. The narcissism of ourselves as the protagonists allows us to anticipate the urgency of our lives while remaining detached from them. That we are being watched by another—some grand observer in the sky—and the experiences that will really only intimately known by each of us become vital to this cosmic web with ourselves at the center. Experiences like this make me think about God. And that one thing Neil Gaiman said about authors being different people all trying to be the same person.

I met you at the library

To read in the same room

But all I could do was look up at you

And your architecture magazines

And pretend that “The Humanist” was more interesting

Than watching you try to make out

The difference between

Geometry and art.

I let us make out behind the bookshelf

Even though I thought PDA was rude

And made me remember

The boy in my seventh grade English class

Who didn’t care to ask whether or not

I wanted his tongue stuck down my throat. 

The first time you stuck your tongue down my throat

Was on Valentine’s Day

And we watched the sunset on the beach.

The cliché tasted bitter in my mouth

But yours was sweet and exotic

And promising. 

That’s the thing about “I love you’s”

-everyone thinks they’re promises.

Over twenty

Pretty without trying too hard

Together for at least six months

Waits two days to call back

Waited at least three dates to have sex

Definitely not the one who cares more

I told you that I loved you

On the balcony of the Carlsbad Forum.

I was wearing way too much makeup

And you kissed me in public again

And everyone below us demanded that we get a room.

We had been together for a month and a half

I was fifteen years old

And I had lied to my parents about where we were that day. 

But there is something magnetic

About kissing in public

And sneaking over to my house for no reason

And admitting that I’m not sure if I fit into your world

And steaming up your car anyway.

There are no ploys.

No tactics to make sure you’re “that into me,”

That I won’t prove myself to be

A sappy, overeager, stereotype hussy

Whose boyfriend treats the cherry he popped

Like it’s cough syrup

The morning after.

I told you I loved you when I didn’t.

You wrote me a letter.

I read it,

And my classmates told me that I looked like

Someone had died.

I told you I loved you when I didn’t.

But when we both made each other mix(ed) CDs

On our second date

I knew I would. 

And I would rather give my red, ugly, fleshy love

To someone that kissed me again

After I talked during our first one

Than wait until I read so many Cosmo advice columns

That it couldn’t look pretty without trying too hard.