Your Downfall

A mess of emotion eats at my empty stomach making it ache deeper, to my core. Desire fills my chest and the act of breathing becomes laborious in the tightened pathways. A need so guttural screams to be released making my teeth grind together in anguish. This uncertainty of your feelings for me is going to destroy me from the inside out. I devour every memory of us in a frenzied attempt to see through you. To dissect your motives and read your signs. The need is an instinctive primal one that consumes me most hours of the day. Sleep hardly offers a solace. Your smile fills my dreams and the places where your figurative fingers met my dreaming skin sting as I wake. Confusion is hardly capable of describing how I feel. I weigh the rewards and consequences of perusing this tugging in my gut with eager fervor. I'd like to tell myself it's your name that this insatiable yearning stems from but I am doubtful. Tracing my steps backward farther and farther into the blackness of the past, I stumble across too many resemblances of these gut wrenching feelings. You are not the problem. It is I. My desire for requited affection grows daily, fed by the hopeless romantic living deep in my soul. The desire for love is accompanied by the strangest want of tragedy though and this makes my hair stand on end with curiosity. All imagined scenarios come with a tragic, painful twist. Without which, they become unsatisfying. The things I write, the stories I create, the desires in my heart have become polluted with a dark taste for pain. It is unsettling to realize this. Maybe I'm drawn to you because of all the red flags and not in spite of them. Maybe triumph over the battles is less of a victory and more of an attempt to placate myself by playing with fire. It is for this reason I hold you at arms length. Close enough to feel the fire under your skin but far enough so as to not be blinded by my want. Protection for you and myself is more important than my desire to dance amid the flames. And the desire for dancing in flames terrifies me. I am not the girl I used to be. I am darned and jaded and changed. I seek out tragedy and find beauty in it where it used to only show me pain. After everything you've been through, I don't want to drag you down too. No matter how much I ache for your touch. Or crave your breath on my skin. Or need to hear your laughing voice. I will not be your downfall. I refuse to be the anchor that drags you to the rocky bottom. If I must sink, I will untangle myself from you first. I will not be your downfall.

Summer Days

These summer days are good for the soul.
They lighten your hair and your heart and only your skin gets darker.
Saltwater is the elixir of life in these times.
Lazy is less of an offense and more of an ambition.
The days are hot and bright and long and waiting to be devoured in the nothingness of relaxation.
Responsibilities seem more like adventure in times like these.
Midnight is an acceptable hour to be prancing upon the beach, soaking in every ounce of saltwater available.
Friendships are seasoned and tested and praised and strengthened by the giddy joy of sun exposure.
These are the days of summer.
The days our souls continually long for.
And I thank God for giving me so many.

The Fault in Me

So I read The Fault in Our Stars today. Yes let's all take a moment to sigh or aww or Ooo or whatever you do when you hear someone's experienced some really beautiful, touching piece of art. But beside its beauty and the artfully written story and the heart wrenching plot, it gave me a sort of new view of myself. Augustus is so openly accepting of all of Hazel's quirks it's quite beautiful. And what I realized is that I try and change who I am for others. Not in a big way, but still. I have a tendency to dumb down my speech or not speak at all because I often throw in words of higher level vocabulary when they aren't needed. I say things like big and tumultuous together. I am not the scholarly person who uses incessant amounts of philosophical metaphors and speaks a soliloquy for a mere thought. I'm the girl who says "dude that was inconsequential". But through the inspirational words of John Green, I realized that one day, someone's is going to find my sporadic use of scholastic words enticing and quirky and cute and lovable. Not at all awkward or annoying or strange. Someday I'll find someone like Augustus who replies to my goofy quips with equally unequal ratios of stupid and brilliant. Someone who knows what all of my big words mean and maybe teaches me more. And starting now, I refuse to dumb down my vocabulary in an effort to make friends or find a significant other. My irregular vocabulary is part of the package and it's a beautiful, freaking awesome package if I do say so myself.

Isolation

Life isolated and alone is not life. No matter how many trials you've been thrown, your soul will always desire companionship. We are social beings created to converse and live with and amongst other beings. No matter how bitter you are or how much you claim to hate people, a life of isolation will not satisfy you. I realized this today. I constantly write about finding love and friends and people and I am one of the most bitter, people hating people you'll ever meet. And yet in the core of my being, I crave interaction. We were created, yes created (but that's a different argument), to be with one another. People get pets for the accompaniment. People marry for love and life together. Social interaction is crucial. I promised myself today that since I have realized this, I will try and be more open to others. I have dispositioned myself to scoff at going to lunch with people and going for coffee. I have dispositioned myself against other people because so many people have failed me. Today I realized that I can't assume everyone will fail. I have to give everyone their own chance. I have to be open to their attempts and forgiving in their failures because we are all human and all destined to fail. We cannot condition ourselves to be cynics. We cannot push everyone away because of the actions of those that came before them.

Every Motion

I'm reading into every motion.
Every word.
Every look.
Is this how friends behave?
I try and use caution as I have been wrong so many painful times before but I have a tendency to be reckless.
A tendency to fall into things to soon.
To take on things I can't handle.
Things I don't want.
My track record is marred and scuffed up with the records of my failings.
Of my misguided judgments.
Of my mistakes.
I can't help but think you'll just be another name on the list of people I ruined.
I am careful with everything but my heart.
And truth be told, I know you have a habit of breaking those.

I pretend not to be jealous when you look at her.
I try to ignore the sickness in my stomach as you say her name over and over and over again.
I tell my self "he's just a friend" "he's just a friend" "he's just a friend"
Somehow, no matter how many times I say those words they never feel quite true.
This friendship is something I don't want to jeopardize though.
So I go on joking and laughing and watching.
I go on acting like a storm of nerves doesn't hit me every time I see you.
I go on acting like you're just my stupid friend.
Truth be told, I don't know how to stop acting.
I don't know if I should.
All I know for certain is that I want you in my life, as whatever you are, forever.