a place such as this
dedicated to my family, who gave me the words and my friends, who taught me to share them
“I keep remembering– I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.”
-Henri Barbusse
“the poet’s promise”
I don’t have the words but I will always try.
we have been here many times before, but never in this way. see our footsteps in the carpet, hear our echoes in the hall. we have been here many times before, but the evening light streaming through the window has never looked quite this radiant. we have been here many times before, we have left our doors open many times in hopes we’d find each other here again. perhaps now we can have softness and certainty. perhaps now we’ve earned that.
today I am dreaming and dwelling wandering down wistful garden paths in that violet space between wake and dream today I’ve nowhere to be but everywhere I’ve never been before today that is quite enough for me
the tea has steeped too long and now it is bitter. it tastes like your name. how did we get here? which path brought us to this place? you are the cruelest lullaby I ever loved.
I don’t know why I keep them. maybe it is because they never left. maybe it is because I never let them. they are the ones whose names I never stopped saying, whose favorite colors I never stopped seeing. to love something is to make it part of you, and I fear if I forget them I will forget who I was, too. every night when I climb in bed I feel them climb in beside me, a shivering halo of hands on my heart, and every morning I wake up praying they are gone. in truth I am tired of carrying them with me. in truth, I am not sure how much longer I can. so tonight, I’ll kiss their satin heads and tell them they can leave whenever they want. and maybe, at last, I will wake up in the morning alone.
we have lived many shades of life, you and I.
when I was young I was bright pink like bubblegum, like faces after running. I imagine you were violet; that was your favorite color when we met and there were glimpses of it in the childhood photos we shared with laughter and lipgloss.
when we got older we were yellow. when I looked at you I saw the best parts of me reflected like sunlight in my bedroom window. we were quilted creatures lingering on summerish nothings, on the simple divinity of belonging.
then one morning we were not who we used to be.
I got bluer you got redder and we just didn’t match anymore. I have lived many shades of life–see the brush strokes for yourself–but I hope someday life will paint us the same way once more.
it was cold outside when you went away. you dropped pieces of me in the snow so I gathered them with aching arms, I mended them with shaking fingers. I have always cared for things that are not quite whole and I think that’s something you should think about. there was once love here, you know, I can see its blood in the snow, which is why the memory stays even while I am hard at work burying the sunshine boy in the woods of the past. you are a ghost who forgot you were haunting, every crack in the china is a reminder of a love that never quite fit but I am still here trying to fix it, cutting hands on jagged edges and forgetting red is not always a kind color.
I think you already know the truth that I am just now reaching: if you want to erase me, you will have to erase a great deal of yourself as well.
perhaps I am a weeping willow. perhaps my beauty has been in my sorrow all along.
things you left behind:
- me. did you notice? I hope when you do you will come back. if you do I will not go with you. but it will be nice to know you wanted me to.
- your favorite color. I see it everywhere. you have made it a thing that causes pain. murder weapon: yellow.
- stuff we did. all hollow now. I loved a lot of things besides you. but I can’t seem to relearn how to love them when you are not here.
- empty words. you did not take them with you. that could be because you did not mean them. it could also be because you meant them too much.
- full words. from you: “I love you.” from me: “I believe you.”
“love grown old”
you came into the room all those years ago so quietly I almost did not hear you love me. a soft life, you told me. that is what I offer. your hand felt like truth so I took it.
I can no longer recall all the meadows in which we dreamt, all the stars with which we danced, but I am glad to have done all things next to you. I am glad to have had your love. I am glad to have given you mine.
I loved the artist because I wanted to be his muse but a pedestal is a dangerous thing to fall from
“doll-breaker”
gentle things love you I am not gentle but I love you.
you do not love sharp things this is why you do not love me sharp things do not break.
you cannot break me though your gentle hands tried I am unbroken but I am not sharp.
what clearer beauty could one seek? what higher truth is to be discovered? if greater of these you find, you will know where to find me: sitting beneath a tree somewhere, listening to him love the world.
the things that scare me most are the things I’ve always wanted I want to go home but I’m already there my mind is the most dangerous place to stay but there’s nowhere else to go
leave my sorrow alone–it kept me company long before you did.
we are always saying goodbye letting go of aching hands knowing too well and leaving too quietly there are forgetful nights when I have the weakness to ask if we want so badly to stay why don’t we?
in the summer you took my hand and asked me to dance. in the winter you were gone. God does not tell us when it is the last time because if we knew we would never let go.
don’t get too close or you will see how often you have hurt me. don’t go too far away or I will remember how often I let you.
I am a haunted house home to a ghost with brown eyes he lived here long after he left
I have loved you for the last time. like dust in the rain all that is has become what was and we will never be who we are now again.
smile, my love, isn’t this better?
let us be thankful we were allowed this time. let us be thankful we knew such a love: this love that mends, this love that kills.
I am always trying to find in faces that are not yours all the ways we were.
he is too bright for this world. I get too close and my skin glistens and cracks and never heals, he is written on me in scalding letters and simmering ash. I can’t touch him because the brush of his fingertips is a forest fire, because his eyes are cinders. don’t you see? I am just paper and dried flower petals, melting, melting, wind-carried and scattered by his hands. I, great and mighty, reduced to soot at the sight of him. he is not the light that guides me home, he is the spark that sets it aflame, yet I am still trying to make him my candle when he was never meant to be carried. if I love him any more there will not be any more of me left to love and the scary thing is I don’t think this bothers him. the scariest thing of all is I don’t think this bothers me.
and yet I have the secret suspicion that if you just held my hand, you would know every truth of me
I have tried and failed to tell you. they are all weak and empty versions of “I love you. I always have.
I’m sorry I got in the way.”
if we ever say goodbye, know that I will carve your name on every tree, whisper it on every wind, so that eons from now there will be proof a love such as this once existed.
this could never be considered a matter of choice. he threw his head back to laugh and it was over–the gavel fell, the bell tolled. now, in a shallow grave of my own making, I wonder if the broken heart was worth that brief moment of having a whole one.
through the mist of the storm I ran to you but you did not answer when I called your name, you did not offer it when I reached for your hand.
it took me four summers to realize that for you, the storm was ever and always me.
it is no longer possible for you to be unknown by me. I would know your footsteps in the sand by any ocean, I would follow them any distance so long as it meant hearing your laugh just one more time. there is no remedy for this–you looked at me like memory and it was done. know I will never stop waiting for your knock on my door. know you will walk with me in dreams for the rest of my life.
I dreamt it all went right with us.
so simple. so sure. we kept our promises. we frequented book stores and cut oranges on the counter. the days were sweet and your name sweeter, I held the sound of it to my chest like proof of you. how lovely we might have been. how sad it is to think so.
I could never show the boy the wound I hid because he was too clever not to notice it was in the shape of his hands
his eyes had promised her galaxies long before he ever said hello
he is new, new, new, and bright all over. he is reality shaped like dream and our every touch is tinged with promise. like a mirror painted yellow, in his eyes I am a radiant thing.
do you think there is a chance he could love me?
do you think there is a chance
I could deserve it if he did?
my little apocalypse. the sky was black and you were gold and I was only ever yours you propped up the rubble in the shape of a castle and told me the settling dust was snow. did you know it would end, like this, ash and toil and dying sunflowers? I always thought we deserved a more glamorous end than this I suppose all falling stars do
when love songs turn fatal, I lie still unraveling to the sound of romances that do not know my name
I have always planted myself beside the things that I love. often I become so intertwined that I can no longer distinguish where I end and the loved thing begins. like annotations in the margins, I have hidden pieces of who I am in everything that makes me feel. there are times when I find hastily-scrawled notes between the covers in writing that is not my own, it is then I know someone else has made this beautiful thing their home, too, taken from it what they will and passed it to the next set of hands. isn’t that the business of life, really, to be ever-loving, ever-sharing?
you are loved not for what you bring to the table, but because you’re at the table at all.
sleeping in my childhood room, I am making friends with the girl who used to live here. she was bright and kind and always, always afraid. she knew more than she let on and mourned tragedies that never happened and tried desperately to love but always talked herself off the ledge. the books she cherished, the flowers she pressed, the drawers that still hold the bits of life she thought worthy of keeping, they are telling me the story of who I have been and why. it is true, I clung to her dearly and asked her not to go away but she knew better than I that she could not stay. I see her, sometimes, when I watch her favorite movies or smell my mother’s perfume. she is the streetlight in front of my house, the bench at the park around the corner, the stuffed dog who sleeps at the end of my bed. I can still feel her hand on my heart as I live the life she dreamed about, and I hope every day I make the little girl in my mirror proud of who we have become
but if the sky fell beneath the streetlights and the stars dared us to breathe without them would you help me put the picture frames back on the wall? the end of the world was only ever that without you anyway
of all the dreamers who believed we could make it, we were the least sure.
I am often thinking of the seashell in my desk drawer. so much depends on how it got there, from the ocean’s hands to yours to mine. a pearly little traveler, he has wandered his way into an intersection of identical souls and dissimilar hearts–to you, perhaps, he is only a shell, but that is not all he is to me
perhaps if I loved a little less I could put down the things I carry–white paper and stars and a red thing I do not like to name. perhaps then I could quiet the violet seafoam swirling in the space where I breathe. perhaps I could live lighter. alas, that is not the writer’s way.
if we could speak now like we used to I would tell you 5 things that are real.
1. I’m proud of you. I don’t think you hear it enough and it’s true. you have lost me many times but you have never lost how proud I am of who you are.
2. I miss you. we are two-sided mirrors, our reflections do not tell the truth to each other and I can no longer decide what you are, but I wish I could. I wish a lot of things that cannot be.
3. you will always be important to me. I have memorized you too well for that to be a lie. I love that when you laugh, it’s not always your mouth, it’s often just your eyes, and the truth is I will always want your car in front of my house.
4. I forgive you.
5. I’m sorry.
he waited for me in the spaces behind my eyelids and the lapses in my judgement
on sharp-tongued days I ask myself if you rifled through all that I am and saw the things that dwell there, would you stay?
if you took handfuls and handfuls of the dust in my chest, let it sift through your fingers and taint the spring wind, if the thorns behind my eyes kissed your arms with bloody lips, would you ask me where my flowers went?
would you revisit the graves in the backyard of my mind and with soft-eyed courage uncover what rests beneath the soil, mourn the dead in me as I have mourned it?
when Anne Sexton said, “I fear I will be ripped open and found unsightly” she was giving words to the choking terror ever climbing in my throat is it possible for a spiral-staircased soul to ever be truly loved, truly known?
dream 1:
I live in a cozy house with a cozy husband and we share in what we love together, painting life as golden as the afternoon glow shining through our ever-open windows. we push the skeletons in our closet aside to fill the shelves with mementos of a life well lived. we grow flowers and name our children after them, we raise them by the sea and read to them before bed and show them our favorite films, reciting every line. we teach them that love can be soft and good; it just takes a selfless spirit and a gentle heart and commitment to the everyday. our home is full of words like “forgive,” “always,” “together,” because they describe who we are, because this is our world now, side by side, hand in hand.
dream 2:
I am alone but I am happy, in the truest way one can be. every morning I make my tea and go to work and when I get home that night my teacup is still there, waiting for me, right where I left it last. there are plants and art in every corner of my very quaint and very female apartment and I have a pink couch, because I can. I host dinner parties for the friends I love and we wash the dishes together while the record player spins in the living room. I am deeply invested in all that makes me feel, I belong to farmers’ markets and libraries and quiet park benches beneath sighing trees. life is simple and ever golden, even though, and especially because, it is just me.
today the sky is stark and clean, paper before the pen, and I think she is telling me the truth: now, now, it is time to begin again
“the autumn of us”
like flower petals soaked in rain, I am very fragile today, anciently young and frighteningly aware of my own proclivity to shatter. it is springtime now yet I am still in my winter clothes, mourning summers I have watched die. the cruel fate of humanity is we will always love things better when we know they are leaving. so, in the autumn of us, I will kiss your hands with thawing lips and love you like melting snow–with the knowledge that you could never have stayed here for long. may the skies you find next be bluer than the ones I have given you.
at first it was green and unfurling, sweet-smelling and gentle. I thought it was L-O-V-E, the big-and-beautiful-letters kind. I thought a lot of things that were pleasant and light and fallible, I am always making flowers from weeds and diamonds from raindrops. maybe I didn’t love you in the big-and-beautiful-letters-way but what I had for you was kind and real and I would not have shied away from the dark spots you try to hide. I would’ve cared for them, too, if you’d let me.
I don’t know what to call it but whatever I had for you crystallized the edges of it are no longer kind and when they scratch against me I break them away. they do not grow back.
I am becoming green and unfurling, sweet-smelling and gentle again. I will have it someday, L-O-V-E in big and beautiful letters. I hope you know you will have it, too, even though it will not be with me. I hope you know you and I are going to be alright.
we must learn to forgive yourselves for getting love wrong. there is no shame in taping up flowers and mistaking them for a garden. just know in your heart that someday you will find a garden you did not have to make yourself.
white sheets.
I am good and clean. there has never been a time when this was not so. my hands are empty because life is a dirty thing to carry. my page is blank because stories are not always kind, they leave blots that you cannot erase and I fear I am not strong enough to scrub them away.
white page. there is a stain growing in my chest, ink dripping from my collarbones. perhaps if I folded in on myself I could hide its seeping fingers from view. it is better to be half of an unblemished person than to be all of a broken one.
white smoke. my sharp tongue lights more forests aflame than my willing tears can extinguish. see the soot beneath my fingernails, hear the sorries between my teeth. I have always been jealous of storms because they get to be calamitous and beautiful.
white sky.
I am calamitous and beautiful. there will never be a time when this is not so.
so I watch you move on bright yellow paling to beige hoping in some self-sabotaging way you’ll finally realize it was never my calm you wanted, not truly not when the only serenity I’ve ever been able to promise you is the kind you’ll have once I’m gone
sometimes on quiet days I let myself break. I do not sew myself together again.
I put my hair up and ignore the loose strands. I do not clean my room. I do not do anything light or pretty like arrange flowers or make tea. in fact, on this day I am not very kind. I figure breaking is not a nice thing so I don’t make myself be one either. see all my fractures frictioning, see how beautifully the ruptures ripple.
I am broken and you are too. let’s share our scars and love them. let’s break and remind each other that tomorrow, we will be whole again.
your name is a promise I cannot keep
here in the stillness of “after”
I am hard at work dismantling the dream I dreamt for us. taking frames off walls, packing dishes away, pressing flowers between once-beloved pages. I will sweep up the remnants of all that we wanted, all that we had hoped to return to, a golden place with two chairs at the table and two keys hung by the door. some of this I will use again the next time I have a dream to build, but most of it will stay here, nestled in memory, only and ever yours.
your name is a mantle upon which I have hung every lovely thing my heart has cherished. at your feet are pieces of who I have been, spare book pages and flowers wrapped up in newspaper, every hope and every ribbon of promise. but you are burning, and so is it all, and so am I. please don’t hate me when I say I just can’t stay here anymore. please don’t test me when I say that even still, if you asked me to, I would.
perhaps in the end I was ashamed of loving so much when there was so little to love.
the thing about him is that I did not love him. it was awe, I think, awe of the way he existed in full frame, in full color, in full range of motion. he was so full of this beaming radiance, shimmery like sunlight on water. he was a moment in a Polaroid, it seemed wise to always keep him within sight because it was such a waste to miss him. trying to give words to him was like trying to describe summer, or why your favorite song is your favorite. it just is. he just was. it is possible that I loved him. but really I think it was awe.
“going home”
it happens once a year when the sky turns gold. the clock ticks slowly but it ticks just the same and when the leaves begin to twirl I know the time for nesting is over. it is time to waltz once more with goodbye, to neatly package each “so-long” with a pressed flower and an expiration date. in my dormant season I became one with this house, this magical place from which every honeysuckle memory of childhood revolves and watched through my fingers as the projector of life clicked on, but now it is time to go.
I am frightened but only because I know this reflection in my mirror will never be here again.
I am frightened but only because this version of me held so much joy and I am never quite sure if I’m allowed more. I will leave her behind in the backyard beneath the golden trees, hoping the version who comes next loves a little better and crumbles a little less. knowing she probably won’t but that’s what makes her who she is. it is time to go home. it is also time to leave it.
I am numb fringed with violent lace
“death by unrequited love”
if you were here, you would weep.
your tears mixing with mine we were always united in our sourceless grief in our raging, lavender passion about things not simple enough to name sorrow that breathes, love that kills
your blade was swift and sweet and it met me where I was where I’ve always been near to you but beneath your notice now my hands paint the stream red
I thought you’d hold my hand as I went but I can’t lift my head anymore to see the sky hear how sweetly the dirt calls me home the wind’s whisper in the tall grass reminds me of your voice
if you were here, you would weep.
you asked me once why I was afraid of you.
what a question, sunshine boy, you see through my rainclouds every. single. time.
I am a many-layered thing bookshelf creature, folding flower but you rifle through my ruffles as if you were flipping through CDs
when I ran away you held on to the things I used to be I wasn’t sorry for so many things then so I danced more often and tripped a little less I did soft things like wear brightly-colored shoes and love you. I don’t do one of those things anymore (my shoes are all plain colors now). how do you know I am still a kind thing, beneath it all, even now? you held on to the things I used to be (mainly, yours) and I know you will not let me get away again.
“why are you afraid of me?” because to give in to you is to stay forever and I was never much good at that.
we partook ravenously of the disastrous divinity that is knowing and being known
I’d like to think Love knows my face, if not my name. I’d like to think she has seen me in glimpses, a smile behind a fluttering curtain, a laughing figure stepping out the door.
sometimes I leave the window open for her–I tell her she is welcome to come in whenever she pleases. I tell her I will make myself ready for her.
I can picture it now, the shining day when she does come I imagine the sunlight in my room the flowers on the table. someday I will hold Love’s hand. someday she will know my name.
must you follow me to the places I only dare go alone?
must you love the parts of me I had wanted forgotten?
love me at your convenience, bury me at your convenience. to be with you is to live so to be without you is nothing at all.
I’m sure she is lovely, and I’m sure you are happy, and I’m sure there will come a day when you forget me. but until then I hope you’ll think of me when you smell lavender, or see the sunlight filter through the trees. I hope my name will rhyme with summer days in the meadow and crackling voices on the record player.
someday you’ll be in a bright and warm place and it will remind you of me for the last time. on that day please bury me the way I deserve, with wildflowers and not bouquets, with fondness for the dreams we saved for “someday” and not regret for the fact we never got there. in return,
I promise to stay buried. I think, after all this time, I owe you that.
if nothing else I will be soft. that is my comfort in this world, to do the kind, human things that bring me joy. to laugh and eat bread and paint things. to wear ribbons in my hair and write notes in my books. I believe in great purpose but if at the end of all things there is nothing more than stars then I will rest knowing at least there was this–sunlight in the garden, and Sunday mornings with you.
it wasn’t the staying that proved how much he loved her, but the leaving
the thing about the feeling is that I don’t like it, but I let it sleep under the covers with me and I smile at it when I can. the thing about it is it takes a lot of me, sometimes more than I can afford, and those are the days when I don’t get out of bed. it will swallow me if I let it which is why I sing, and wear ribbons in my hair, and love people hurricane-style, and write things that make me want to run down the street without shoes. the thing about the feeling is I have it, but it does not have me.
“ode to mental health”
but you see the danger is I would go anywhere so long as my ticket was the seat next to yours
“tomorrow is new”
what a thrill living is!
what great fun, to think tomorrow could bring a book, song lyrics, bread with butter, new love, any combination of these!
what a merry world.
what luck it is to draw breath.
I have never understood “forever” and yet we are made of it, our hands are full of it. we are tinged with promise, marked by always, there is eternity in your smile and fate in your laugh. please tell me you feel it too. please tell me we could make this love a home.
“growing pains”
it never occurred to me that the boy I left on my front porch could ever be gone when I came back. it never occurred to me that maybe, after all this time, it was never really you I missed but the person I was when we belonged together. the glistening sentimentality of it all, when all we knew were the stars above the park and the space between the other’s fingers. it never occurred to me that maybe I miss you in the hopes of getting back there, in the hopes of fitting once more into a past I grew out of a long time ago.
“a place such as this”
the flashes of it were there in the green haze of my dreams and the corners of my Polaroids glimpses of us as we used to be when the sunlight painted freckles on your nose and the trees whispered of summers now laid away. I could feel the truth of us in the air, it lived in my fingertips, my spine, in the chlorine-frayed edges of my hair. our kingdom was the skatepark after dark and the front porch of my childhood home, its subjects denoted by skinned knees and well-loved sneakers.
it is nice to know that there was once a place such as this, even if it now belongs to a past we grew out of a long time ago.
acknowledgements
all my love and gratitude to:
Cami Landreth for tirelessly formatting my vision to perfection
Samuel Nassar for the most beautiful cover photography
Colby Bauman
Ciena Fitzgerald
Colson Ayars for letting me borrow their talent with a camera to portray in my book
Ava Valdez
Mackenzie Hansma
Faith Wills for being my muses always
my friends from college for inspiring me to be more
my friends from home for being the most golden part of the childhood this book commemorates
Dad Kendall Chelsey for being the family I wish everyone could have
and finally, my beautiful mother for turning this project from a dream to a reality. I owe you everything I am.
I am so incredibly blessed to have had each of these groups of people touch a place such as this in some way. It is a very rare and very precious thing to be able to say the photography present in my book was contributed not only by artists whom I respect and admire, but by cherished friends who have lived the poetry by my side. I am surrounded on all sides by encouragement, inspiration, and love, all because of the names listed here. I can never tell you all you mean to me, so “thank you” will have to suffice.
thank you.
wabout the author
Peyton Bell is a young poet based in California. In search of a creative outlet, she began experimenting with poetry in 2018, finally sharing her work with the public in 2022. Peyton is an avid admirer of movies, her hometown, and God’s creation.
Read more from her on Instagram @peytonthepoet.
a place such as this , the first collection of poems from young writer
Peyton Bell, is a love letter to those people, places, and recollections that remain forever cherished in memory. As the years go by and new hopes, loves, and heartbreaks are gathered, there will always be those moments in time that we return to— those places such as this.
