A Litany of Confessions

Is there a word for the moment when you win an argument?
when the punches have landed when you weren't even looking and how even though you've won you feel the air gushing out of you in defeat?
it's the same word for the moment when your ex lover chokes out that he's getting married with a tongue that has just ploughed you into supplication.

my friend is falling in love and it's glorious to watch.
she's knitting his name into anything that moves, into any story that dares to draw breath
his existence is always being spilled into conversations and she's kneading love into his body between endless cocktails and tears and burning and she's feeling the most she has ever felt in her life and even though they are tap dancing across continents and around people, he is still her favourite place to exist. he is discovering the grenades between her skin and picking them off one after the other because in this love story the princess rescues herself and the prince is just along for the ride.

I am not in love with you but everything is all light and weightless.
You tell me stories that make me throw my head back and gulp the breaths of others around me
everything is garlic and ginger and cinnamon
i am not in love with you but you walk in like you belong here and
in the absence of speech our bodies make summer when you pour me on your backseat.
I will never call you home but the seams of my body are coming unraveled in your hands and i don't know how to put this much shame into poetry.
do you know what the world sounds like after everyone leaves?
after you have picked your teeth and tucked your conscience back into view
after you have peeled me out of my skin and spilled me on the floor in penance
i lay there and whimper out a prayer,
i say:
Forgive me Lord, but i am so lonely and sad and just looking for a body to disappear into.

25.

I've been grappling with what i want to say in this post.
every year i ask the current year to be kinder to me than the previous year was
i think each year is competing with the last to be my worst year yet.
my twenties have been ridiculously tough.
there were times during my 24th year that i didn't think i was going to survive my 24th.
but i did it, didn't i?
it definitely didn't make me stronger; i think that saying is bullshit but i'm still here am i not?
i survived. i crossed over. i'm here at 25, alive, keeping the demons at bay.
I'm still struggling with christianity. i honestly think to be a very good christian you have to find a way to keep the doubts away but i am not succeeding.
i'm trying to still keep it all together because i literally cannot afford to be an atheist. i really can't. because even on my worst days of not believing, i still need the comfort that there is someone higher than me, who is all knowing and all seeing who loves me and will see me through.

I've been writing this blog for 8 years now.
8 years!!
it's so refreshing to read through it and see how much i've evolved, how much my opinions on so many things have changed, how much i've grown. i think that's really the best part of blogs, to see how far you've come.
while reading through, i noticed how many of my new year or birthday posts talked about trying to be a better person. ha. i can tell you definitively that i have not succeeded on that front. i wish i could be that girl with the sunny personality, running around in the gardens, wearing flower crowns, getting told that my aura is peaceful and being all peace and love (barf) but i'm just not that girl. i can't even be friends with people like this and when i meet them on the internets i just think and have such strong convictions that they're faking.
but as the great Desus and Kid Mero would say - I believe God is still working on me, beloved.

anyway,
here's to 25,
be kinder to me than 24 was.
i really, really need you to be.

love,

leggy.

It's 1 am in Nola and we're briefly gorgeous.

There's an old apartment somewhere in America tucked in between a city adorned in sin and the sky's blue dress.
Some nights have found me here wrapped around a skin that looks nothing like mine.
you say my full name, always
and i'm utterly unraveled into sighs
there are people who rip you apart
and there are people who pick up the pieces one after another
my problem is that you are both and i've learnt to take the little light that filters in with the darkness
we have been reenacting this 6 year long one night stand and refusing to let go
but darling, it's art to watch yellow skin entangled in white sheets while the moon mocks us
we flitter in between our real lives and boyfriends and girlfriends who come and go
we return and reach for each other in between the loves that we think will stay
i have tried to picture my life emptied of you and every time I find someone whose skin is a reflection of mine, i try;
but i end up seeing you in every yellow ceiling, every broken and splayed sun, every drunken lip.

remember that summer night we went camping
and you played Blind Pilot's "3 rounds and a sound" until i couldn't bear it
we looked out into the starless sky for the longest trying to decide what to do with a love like this
you kissed my neck and built a light house on my chest
and we held our breath and waited for the inevitable shipwreck
I swirled into every part of you, curled up and refused to untangle
i'm terrified of my skin and its constant need for touch
you tell me that the louisiana bayous are disappearing, that the gulf of mexico is swallowing them whole and refusing to let go,
you tell me that the next time we go camping that that piece of land would have been lost.
we never go camping again;
and i think of this night every time i'm on the beach watching the ocean gently try to engulf the earth

tonight, i'm drunk and crying because the demons return sometimes
they creep in when i'm not looking
and you're cooking me eggs
and reading me pages from your medical books; and baby
I would have burnt the world down for you if you'd asked



leggy.