Watching You Dance Is Like Witnessing Something You Never Thought Existed Till Now. It’s Like Finding

Complacency masked by the gentle glove of understanding,

(my friends always did say I was too accommodating).

And you- this poor, poor boy who was caught in the middle of a drama.

(You call it a drama, I call it the thing that makes me feel unsafe in my own skin)

“You cannot expect me to throw away 5 years of friendship”

I said okay, okay.

I did not want the assault to take away my friendships after it took

The deep appreciation I used to have for this body

My smile

My life.

But today I saw you give the man that raped me a big hug. 

You know- those big i-missed-you man hugs?

I felt the anger tear across my palms, two fists ready to meet the drywall. 

How could you. 

You know what he did.

You know what he took from me.

And I realise you didn’t care.

Because it was not your body he turned inside out. 

It was not your tongue he ripped from your throat. 

You give him a hug full of familiarity and love. 

I don't want to forgive you. 

I don’t want to pretend it’s all alright.

I won’t roll over and accept it this time.

Lovers,Woodstock,1969.

my lover read this and turned to kiss me, said, honey, heaven is anywhere where you are. told me he fell in love with me when I danced with him to frank sinatra in his living room after our first date, hips swaying and lips turned into a crescent moon. if there was ever a moment I wished to repeat, I swear this is the one. this is the one.

my bed for one feels so empty without you here. come over, let’s eat shitty chinese and watch bad tv (which is inherently never a bad idea). kiss me. let’s dance to frank sinatra. kiss me again. sleep next to me, tell me you’ll be here in the morning. tell me you’ll meet me in my dream tonight. kiss me again and again. and again.

a brief primer for the hopeless days, part 2:

Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds (167) | Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’ | Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird  | Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book of the Body That Is the Beloved | Leonard Cohen, ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2′

You seem like the type that would happen anyway.

I smile politely and listen to him as he went on about how sexy he thought my vulnerability was.

My trauma a commodity, a mere accessory to him.

I am the saint in the stained glass window now.

I wonder if I’m the type when he kept his hands where they were even when I asked him to stop. 

The way he mistook my shrinking for permission.

My fingertips were so thin then, 

Pale, peeling skin and a wrecking ball in the empty space in my chest.

I wonder if I’m the type when a man I don’t know follows me home,

The way I tried to swallow the problem, to drop my throat into a whisper. 

To survive by blending, by not being the victim, 

Maybe I had always asked for it. 

Maybe this just happened to girls like me.

kissing you and laughing with you and holding you reminds me that happiness is possible, that happiness is here and that it is here to stay. how wonderful it is to come home to you. how wonderful it is to call you mine, my love. every cell, every inch, every curve of you calls me like the sea. I’ll happily drown in all that you are. happily burn in the sunlight in your eyes. I’m obsessed with all that you are. the chocolate chip cookie grin, the curve of your Adam’s apple, the scent of your skin.

so this is what lovers mean when they say they fall in love with their person more and more everyday. this is what falling feels like.

mustafa and I broke up today. My blue eyed boy is no longer mine. I expected tears to pour out of me, the ground to tear open, the sun to swallow herself with grief. but there is nothing. I feel nothing. he wasn’t the angel I thought he was, this picture perfect boy with a smile like gold. he was just a boy. screwed up and scared and flawed through and through.

said to me my body kept me with him. that passion overcame him and that’s he’s just a man. just a man. how could i expect him to be anything more. said to me the light in my eyes meant nothing to him. said he doesn’t see the point in staying. I felt the breath catch in my throat as we said goodbye at the edge of the river.

blue eyed boy. stay safe too.

I've nodded and being complicit in my own destruction, maybe more than I should have. because that was way easier than arguing about it, so much easier than just saying no because I am so used to the word falling on deaf ears. Our relationship wasn’t that bad, I say to my girlfriends. But I would close my eyes and leave my body and whisper to my bleeding heart: turn over, you don’t need to like it. god knows that’s not what he wants anyway. you just need to do it. close your eyes and lose yourself to him. do what he wants. do it. felt myself cower into nothingness. again.

“….” by Emily Byrnes

“Someone will tell you that she’s seeing someone someday and that she’s happy and your hands will stop working. You’ll have to work hard to hold onto whatever you’re holding. I hope it’s not glass, I hope it’s not breakable. Suddenly you’ll remember everything that you ever loved about her. Everything that ever moved you to tears, made your insides feel like they were tying themselves into knots. That she was loyal, that she was open for you, that she smiled against your mouth when you kissed. That it felt easy, like God had put the two of you together deliberately, like it had been the plan all along. But for whatever reason, you let her go and you thought that it was the right thing and for a little while, it felt like you knew exactly what you were doing. Except now all the parts of you that touched her knows that you’re never going to be able to touch her again and that hurts. Even your fingers are sad, even your stomach is aching from the loss of it all. You’re never going to get that again and that’s why your regret looks like artwork that would have been masterpiece if you’d finished it. Your regret looks like plucking a flower before it’s bloomed. So maybe you’ll call her and you’ll tell her that you miss her and she’ll sound gentle on the phone but not in love with you anymore. She’ll say ‘we happened and we were important but you let me go, I’m sorry, but you let me go’ and that’s how you’ll know.”

— Azra.T  (via 5000letters)