Writing Again

It’s a wonder; here I am again and so is September.

My heart beats for you and for melancholy even in my sleep.

I’m restless and homesick with memories of you.

You messaged again, consistency.

I can’t help but miss you and miss me too. I’ve lost who I am and who I was but you know me. Message some more and maybe you’ll bring me back to myself.

I can’t still my thoughts or my dreams except to drag this pen across paper and hope the words convey the nostalgia.

My heart feels bruised again.

I’ll probably be right here, with dreams and a pen, every September; writing again.

Hope this finds you well,

-L

Dreams

I can’t control dreams,

But if I could,

I would steer them away from you.

I have no desire to dream of utopia but wake and live in reality.

Dreams bring me to you, to us; to our other dimension, as we used to say.

The dreams aren’t real but the feelings I awake with sure are.

If I can only have moments of you in dreams, perhaps I should stay asleep so I can keep dreaming.

Alas, I cannot control dreams.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

If Memories Were Ink

I’ve been trying to write about myself but all that comes easily to paper is you.

That’s all I have left.

Maybe if I write enough, I can let go.

With each swoop and loop, may the ink take away the knowing and the missing, the feeling and the lingering.

Take the vividness and the longing.

May all the memories be the ink that comes to dry across pages instead of tears that streak across my cheeks.

I don’t really want to forget.

I can never really forget.

I’m certain that eventually all pens run out of ink.

Here’s to writing and to hoping.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

Anything

It doesn’t matter.

I’d do anything for you.

These lines we’ve crossed,

The lines we will cross.

They do matter.

We put ourselves here.

And yet,

They don’t matter.

We wish we could believe ourselves

And our lies.

I’d cross an ocean for you

And every line we could dream of.

That’s what love is.

It follows us still.

Love has drawn the lines,

And love crosses them.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

Starlit Nights

11:04pm

9:59pm

00:05am

10:27pm

Relegated to darkness; our connection never allowed to see the light of day.

Thank the guilt for that, perhaps circumstance.

We burned too brightly then, now, so much less deserving.

Still we linger, clinging to that promise of darkness.

Never chancing dusk; never daring morning.

I’ll take it.

I’ll take any time with you.

The stars we traded from sunlight will have to do.

I just wish us many more starlit nights and moonbeams, my love.

May the darkness hold us close and cherish our secrets as much as we do.

Hope this finds you well,

-L

September Melancholy

My pen bleeds onto paper ever September.

Melancholy is my muse.

To millions, this month is a beginning; to me, it’s always a goodbye.

The seasons change and drag us along with them. As the leaves turn from green to yellow, and then to brown, my mood begins the same change.

Perhaps I’ll always be sad in the fall; who wouldn’t be if they’d lived the same autumns that I have.

Missing, always. Madness too.

The leaves dry, as do my tears.

I wish to crumple up with them on the ground and let September pass me by while my pen bleeds me dry.

Hello, September.

Goodbye.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

Consistency

Consistency from you is eternally painful, yet I wish, hope, dream, and pray for it anyways.

I hate that I need it but I love that even now, you never let me down.

Steadiness is your nature.

I wonder where I’d be without a dose of it every September.

You, still the only one who remembers my birthday year after year.

This one kindness sustains me and keep my confidence alive.

Patience is not something I possess but I never have to wait for you; you always show up for me.

I’ll be waiting for you next year; consistency.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

My Terracotta Heart

Here I am, hoping, with my terracotta heart.

Hoping, once again, that one fall will be too little to send shards of my heart flying through the air.

Too many times I’ve gathered the pieces together and swept the floor.

The only cleaning ritual that ends without satisfaction.

There is no relief at the sight of neat piles and clean floors, only the knowledge of the work that now looms overhead.

Reconstruction.

Reconfiguration.

Refortification.

All so I can sit and hope again.

This time maybe I’ll wish too, with my terracotta heart.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

Indefinite

You asked me once how I healed from a breakup, and I told you it was time that took care of it. In a way, that’s true. That’s not what it feels like sometimes.

So what does it feel like sometimes?

At the halfway point between my home on the farm and my home in the city, alone in my car: that’s when I feel it the most.

It feels like I’m living without half of me. It feels like I’m always searching and waiting. It feels like I’m looking for something that I can’t quite put my finger on. It feels like my heart has been cleaved in two; or like it has gone missing from my chest- I can feel where it used to be. It’s excruciating. It’s indefinite.

I have lied to my heart and have told my soul a fairytale. I have convinced myself that I believe in soulmates and dimensions. I need to. I cling to my hope that in another dimension we’ve found our way back to each other; that our ragged edges have met and joined again. In another lifetime, perhaps, our paths have crossed with better timing and the fates have kinder plans for us.

A love like ours cannot have been for nothing. The sheer amount of it can’t have just faded away into nothing. Surely the laws of physics apply to love, for what is love if not energy? It feels consuming and electric. I need to believe that it still exists out there somewhere. The heartbreak cannot be larger and longer-lasting than the love that caused it.

These are the lies I tell myself. They must be working and maybe I have successfully fooled myself. It doesn’t always hurt and I go about my life as an ordinary person. But, oh, those moments. They take my breath away and I feel like half a person, a hollow shell, like only arms and legs. I have no heart, for you have it still. I can tape together the edges where it once was and I can pretend.

If only reality and fates and fairytales could meet with kindness. Until then, and until another lifetime, our souls exist only as halves; incomplete.

I know you feel it too, you’ve told me so. That doesn’t make it any easier, even if that’s what you had hoped those words would accomplish.

It’s indefinite.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L

Even in the Night

Darkness recognizes darkness.

That’s my theory on why I can’t seem to sleep until it’s light out.

While lying awake at night, I relish the thoughts of just going for a drive, going for late night/early morning McDonald’s, going out and about in the stillest of hours. At night it feels like I can do anything or be anyone.

Yet, as much as my bed often feels like a refuge, it feels like it has walls closing in as soon as the light begins to fade. Walls close in as the darkness quickens.

Sleep never comes easy at night but as the dawn breaks, I’m able to drift away securely.

The darkness in my mind and in my heart recognizes darkness and waits to conquer me once I close my eyes.

Half of this battle is working my entire life around this. In that, I have succeeded. I have worked one entire year of night shifts and have slept soundly during the daylight.

The darkness has all but put out my light.

How can darkness be at once still and freeing, yet heavy and suffocating?

I’m tired of the dark but it still feels safer, though only while awake.

I wish and wish for that eternal darkness where there is no need to worry about waking or sleeping; about dawn or dusk. For that I would go to sleep gladly, even in the night.

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Hope this finds you well,

-L