as i move through

The you before me and the me after you,  are puzzle pieces. From different boxes. One that fit in perfectly and one that fit and also make sense. The you before me and the me after you, are like the sky. From different times. One right before dawn and one that's right after dusk prevails. The you before me and the me after you, are like our songs. From different playlists. One that we hum to sleep and one that keeps us warm. The you before me and the me after you, are like paper cups. From different days. One rich in tea stains and one that we never want to throw away. The you before me and the me after you, are like our favorite flowers. From different memories. One that we keep sheltered between pages and one that we never understood. The you before me and the me after you, are like soft whispers. From different time zones. One that we giggle to and one that we repeat to our skins as we touch. But we are both us. You and me. Like we've always been. People from then and now...

After multiple weeks spent outdoors in the wild, trying to lose parts of her and scar new skin, she has now weakened. Now, the sun is too harsh on her eyes and her feet hurt from walking too much everyday. But there's a deeper pain than that. Her mind has been wheezing with ideas and thoughts that ache her heart so much that she can't look away from it. It's a mess of all things she thought she could fix, things she thought she could build. But now she has been in bed for over 12 hours straight and she doesn't even feel rested. Hey, but wait, her heart isn't just a mess - it's her. It's her yesterday, her today, her tomorrow that she carries around in the 4 chambers. She doubts that they know that. Maybe this is the price she has to pay for trying to hard to do too much at once without ever really sparing a breath for herself. Maybe this is what it will cost her for clinging on to feelings, to people who are distant, whom she can't really approach,...

There are three pages missing in the book she gave me. The shark tooth remnants of those pages are sharp and rigid - like wine stains that don't wash off the white shirt she gifted me. Both of these gifts, now they make me think of us. Days we spent in the chaos of togetherness, days when we let go of the ache of yesterday, days we couldn't tie together with the string lights, days we spent soothing each other's heartbeats. Our aisle of memory was stained, like the shirt. Sturdy tea stains in our tea set, coffee marks on table cloths, wine stains on our fuzzy carpet, mismatched stitches on a broken heart, lead marks on greeting cards, footprints on cement. You name it, we had it all.  But we never whitewashed our walls, never dry cleaned our dirty laundry. Every now and then, we would bring in new friends and take out brand new tea sets, and let them add colors to our walls not to cover our stains but to envelope them enough to keep us sane. Our bridges were woven with s...