You and other failed wishes

June 11, 2012

You and other failed wishes

I think I might be starting to see things differently.

Every time I catch a glimpse of you,

my heart does something funny and unpleasant and

it makes me wonder how many bruises it has,

dropping from such a height

into my stomach.

You were never one who could see constellations

in the freckles on someone’s skin, and you

never understood why my spine would crack sometimes

if I breathed in too deeply.

You never knew that I didn’t like

the things we kept in coffins to stay there for long,

or that every time you hid behind your smile I had to fight

myself a little harder.

So many things began to go unspoken

until I had so much trouble distinguishing

the truth from the not-so-true and I

never truly realized that behind your eyes

you never cared about my mental health, anyway. 

You could always keep pushing it

because in all honesty, I never caught on

that I needed someone

with much better intentions and many more words,

someone who could appreciate in the same way I do

the folds in the jeans at my knees,

or the way the trees in my backyard can sometimes catch

the sunlight.

But I blink.

And I see you

seeing me

differently.

You see the way that my voice is a little too loud and

my laugh a little too much and

how every second I have, I feel the need to prove myself.

You’re beginning to recognize

that I never really had a life of the mind after all,

and I’m actually just one of them

with a very convincing disguise.

My eyes are dead and I still smile mostly

because they tell me too, but I could never manage

to watch my words and not much has changed after all, has it.

No, nothing has changed: you’re just beginning

to get that you really did fool yourself in order to cope

with some reality that sometimes still bothers you

even though you don’t let anyone see it. 

I give a fake little scream at

a ghost or a spider and I believe all the while that I’m

wearing my own clothes when I don’t even own

the thoughts that flow through my head. 

I am so disgusting and obvious and shallow and

it’s killing you now that you ever thought that someone like me

could be beautiful

or in any way good for you. 

I have to close my eyes.

I see too much.

I think about how I have to try not to look angry

even though I am nothing of the sort,

and I feel this creeping hurt in my bones

and in my head and still it makes me tear up

to think that these are the only things

we ever accomplished together.

I still scatter the dandelion seeds,

but if my pride will ever let me,

someday

I think I’d like to look back on what became of us

and wonder,

what kind of wish was this?