Self-Portrait | Tosca Langbert

Arabella Ware

Lately, I’ve been writing about you a lot. Somehow, you have worked your way back into my poetry. I can’t help but paint you with these words of mine because it always looks so beautiful. I miss this. When I could stare at you and masterpieces would pour out of my body with the same delicacy and intensity of your gaze. I miss the way that I could sing when I traced the skin on your neck, but most of all I miss the words that visited me when I loved you. Those were the words that carry lifetimes. Those were the words that carried our bodies together and I have been mute for so long that the aching in my backbone has given way to the inevitable aftermath of a poet’s broken heart. So here it is, plain and simple, three poems of before you loved me, when you loved me, and after you left: ~

There is something very simple about this love. It is like eating cereal at midnight and listening to your favorite song when it’s raining, Lyrics trickle from your lips and poetry glides off of my tongue. You are so gentle. ~

Before you loved me: It is these beginning stages that are the embodiment of love.

Our hearts, honeyed in the prospect of future, are ever so vulnerable. I take your hand with the caution of a child, still learning how to walk, and place a piece of me inside of it, handing you the first fragment of my naive soul. I think of you as I close my eyes, wondering, praying, that somewhere else, you are doing the same. I dream of you as if you are something divine swallowing me in feelings that I don’t yet understand. Oh, how I crave you. I wince, it’s like learning how to breathe again. ~ I learned him. I read him like my favorite book and I sang him like my favorite song. I memorized his texture like it was the only thing I could touch.

When you loved me: When I lie next to you, speak to me. Tangle me in your stories, wrap me in your lullabies, hold me with your poetry. He who holds the ocean in his mouth; pour a steady current from your lips and into my heart. Spill your terrific scripture into my veins so that it pulses through me like electricity. Sow me in everything that you adore, paint me in everything that has hurt you. Read me your testimony, lead me through the massive architecture of your brain, show me what it means to live and how it feels to be alive. I want to melt into you, like candle wax that has seeped into the hardwood floor. I want to dance upon your fingertips as you etch me into paper, teach me how to fall in love without knowing from where. Play symphonies upon the strings of my heart, something that sounds like the end of the world. Take me to the edge of the universe, so that we can fall into each other over and over, steeping in each other’s arms; We are like stars, reborn in the blanketed sky, washed into oblivion by the restless night, burning with so much hunger. Hold my eyes so I can watch the anguish flash across your tired face, let the embers stirring in your soul ignite with passion that burns like a wildfire… and write it down for me. Read it to me.

Give me yourself, inscribed in that perfect parchment paper that you keep on the top shelf. Caress me with your magnificent hands, calloused from the pain that you have leaked into ledgers, sweetened by the joy you have breathed into ballads.

I want to hold you pure in my hands, entirely unrevised. ~

I look up at this boy who I am so dependent on feel his imprint pressing into my soul. He designed my heart in the likeness of himself, then broke it over and over again. I should have moved on, forgotten, but you were a forest and I was a wildfire, We were meant to burn. After you left: I only knew you in this form of impalpable existence. You were every yellowing page in my notebook, every loose leaf of paper that I tucked so lovingly into the pages of my favorite books. And yet we are like puzzle pieces, whose edges have been sanded down so that we no longer fit together.

We pranced upon the threshold of adolescence, swooning in its idyllic simplicities, yet we outgrew each other. Like butterflies, our metamorphoses always looked like departure, and it wasn’t until we untangled ourselves from one another that I realized what love truly feels like. Love is a fire that changes course as easily as the wind. It is anguish disguised as lust; it wears red lipstick and waves a magic wand, but the passion it bears is only a glorified version of hatred. This is what I know about love.

Love is the scars that you decorated me with, love is the words that we fired at each other like bullets. Wounds infected with reality. Love bleeds, and bleeds, and bleeds, and I don’t know how to stop it from killing me. This is what I know about love.

So, each day I dress myself in my armor, I shield myself from your touch, and shy away from your glance, I am not afraid of you, but I am so afraid of falling back in love.

You were so frightened of this manmade perception of commitment, but love does not come in terms, it comes in truths, and perhaps if you had been listening closer, you would be too addicted to my mind to walk away.