Sunsets and Silhouettes

I always liked sunsets. I don't know if I've told you this already, but they're one of my favorite things. 

You took me to our first sunset yesterday, April 24, 2016. The first sunset I've ever shared with someone not from my family. I realized, after you kissed me, while we looked at the pale pinks and pastel oranges that riddled the darkening sky, that this sunset was you, and I needed to take a picture of it. I needed it photographed. 

I need it, so that I will be reminded that you aren't the dark purple storm clouds that have hovered above my skies from the time of my first heartbreak. I need it so that I'll remember you aren't painfully bright, iridescent oranges that blind me every time I fall in love. I need it to tell me that you're not the drastic, dark blue of the night sky during a storm cloud filled sunset. I need it to always remind me that you aren't them. 

You're you. You're this sunset, and our city on a sleepy Sunday when there's no traffic and no bustle. You're a different kind of sunset, and I love you for it.

 

Ropes

Do you recall, clearly, a time when you used to dream? No, not the confusing dreams that become nightmares, not your day musings of impossible future scenarios, but dreams: pure and true, and happy. Can you bring one to mind as vivid as the night you dreamed it?

Can you remember the days when you would laugh at the world's rules, and tell it to leave you alone as you ran away from the voices, laughing ecstatically because it felt so good to be alive? Because you could feel the grass at your feet and the warm breeze whipping your hair back and forth as your laughter was thrown back at you with the sun shining above and the calm waves of the sea lapping by the shoreline not far below.

Do you still remember when you lived? Or does the memory of when you started existing instead cover that in such a black shroud, the memory eluding you every time? 

Do you look at the sky and miss the feeling of being free? Do you look at yourself in the mirror and see the empty chasm where your soul used to reside? Do you feel the ropes binding your ankles and your hands, so tight that they've began chafing the skin? Do your wings still try to break from the bonds that hold them? Do the stars in your eyes still shine, or have they turned into black holes? Has the supernova gone out of your system? Do you still feel your heart beating? Can you hear it? Or has the iron cage that they wrapped around it so tightly constricted it so much that it hurts when it beats, and it hurts when you breathe, and all you want is to rip it out with your bare hands, but you can't because they've been tied?

Do you still cry out in the darkness, for someone to save you? Do you still believe someone will? Because your voice has broken over tears so many damned times, and you've screamed yourself hoarse, you don't know if you still have a voice; and no one came. No one cared. 

Do you still remember when you thought life was worth living?

Do you still feel the rare warm breeze from your prison cell?

Do you still try to fly, even when you don't remember how, even when you can't?

Do tears still fall from your eyes?

Does your heart still beat?

Are you still alive?

Silently at War

There's a war in my head, and my heart's staying out of it. You're making me break every single rule I've ever etched in stone, and I'm locked in a battle within myself. The voices won't shut up when you're gone. They tell me the abandoned graveyard of my dead selves with flowers sprouting from empty chests and shriveled hearts grasped in bony fingers will scare you off, and the fiery landscape of the desolated plains that make up my emotions will scorch you and make you wish for a cooler drink of water. They also say the ice capped mountains of my broken heart beats will make you wish for a warmer love, and that the dragons that guard my thoughts will throw scathing words and poisonous fumes and keep you at bay. They told me the tigress that holds my heart in her blood-stained claws will never let it go, that the fear will grip and cut me to shreds before your eyes and your eyes will fill with disgust, and, much worse, pity. They said you'd wake up one morning and see how broken I am, and that the cracks can't be covered up or stitched together, and I will be too much for you... and you'll leave me, like everyone else, more broken than before and wishing I had never met you... and you wishing you'd never met me.They tell me you'll leave, eventually. You'll grow tired of me, and wander off into the sunset with someone else, someone infinitely more deserving of your love, and not this empty vessel who is never good enough. 

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But when you're there, and you have an arm around my shoulders, the voices stop, and I start feeling. Maybe the abandoned graveyard won't scare you away, maybe you'd take my hand and walk through it with me, while I tell you the stories the skeletons can't. There's a small chance you might be the reason why the polar ice capped mountains begin to melt and start flooding my emotional deserts and they become lush green gardens instead of despicable wastelands. Maybe the dragons will decide to fly away, and the tigress will decide to fall asleep, for once. Maybe the fear will not grip me as heavily this time, and all I will come out with are scratches and a few stitches, and you'll hold me and we'd laugh about it after. Maybe you'll never tire of me, like you said. Maybe I'm worth it this time, maybe I'm enough, finally.
Maybe you're it, finally... But the Tigress and the Dragons refuse to silence themselves, and the voices are still screaming in your absence. There's too much wildness in me to tame, and I'm afraid because you're afraid. But you kiss me so gently sometimes, I start hoping it's me and you, and that sunset in the end; the reds, blues, purples and oranges playing along with the bright pinks and pale yellows. Then you put your arms around my waist, and it makes me think that you'll fight my monsters just fine, and do it with a smile on your face.