Home

I walk into our home and you have incense burning. It smells like smoke and rotting pumpkins and I want so badly to tell you that it doesn't smell like home but this is home which is absoultely confusing to my brain. You have the incense burning and I'm burning on the inside wanting badly to pull you in close,put my nostrils up to your shirt to escape the smell that fills this house. I want to smell you, my actual home. I want to be draped across your lap like a french gril on a fancy vaction and bask in your aroma. I come further inside our home that doesn't smell like home and you finally pull me in close enough that our bodies could be mistaken for one body. I smell you and I get flashbacks of our lives. Our first kiss, your morning dances, the way your hair lays across your forehead when you first wake up, our afternoon walks. I'm utterly postive now that I am home, wrapped up inside your arms standing in our kitchen. It's funny how a smell can mean everything, how the smell of you could hold so much space inside my heart. I relax inside your arms and repeat inside my head I am home, I am home, this is home. You are my home and I'll always perfer the smell of you over incense. -M.D.L

I’ll love you through the realms

I wonder who you are when your soul is tired of searching for me in all the realms but this one. Did you ever even love me here in this existence? Did your heart scream for me in words "I love you" or was I just a convienience for your boredom? I’ll always be sure that I loved you, here in this now but how can you love someone who has no clue how to love you back in their current form. Is love worth it if it exists somewhere between here and all that could be? If it’s not promised in this life but maybe the next.. I’ll never be certain. Our love wasn’t born for this world, it wasn’t wrapped up in a pretty little bow and handed to us. It was drug through the mud, spit out and chewed up. So much so that I am not sure it exists outside my own heart. I’m not sure it ever could survive here in this life. Maybe in the next life your love will set my soul on fire and I’ll forget I ever doubted its existence in the first place. Maybe in the next life we won’t have missed out on what was meant for us. Just not now, not here in this current phase. In this phase our love is grasped under our finger tips only to float into the abyss slowly. It cannot be captured with quick hands, it passes us by like the seasons. My heart yearning and yours running so fast I can’t tell it was here in the first place. Love is finicky and requires the right place, right time and this universe never gave us that. In the next life maybe we will “just know” but in the here and now I’ll continue to miss what could have been. I’ll continue to miss a love that never got the chance to exist because this world was to harsh to our hearts.

Homes of the selfish

I have wrapped my own arms around my chest several times and called it healing. I have dove headfirst into my very being only to pull out what looks like sadness and acts like pain. There is a home here inside me, it swallows me whole and provides comfort where there is none to be found. I drown in this complexity, the feeliing of being both whole and broken. I found a home inside me where you found nothing but an empty version of what I once could have been. I am all that I was and all I could ever be and I dont know if that will ever be enough. I drown within myself knowing that the only person I truly need to impress is me. The only arms that will protect me now dangle at my sides, connected to my body. I am much my own before anyone elses and I dont know if that makes me selfish or wise.I am my own safe haven the only place I have ever felt both comfort and heartache is within these internal walls. I can reside here, inside myself drowning in my complex emotions. While you wonder if I will ever change I will be inside myself fighting to stay the same protecting myself from the moments that could be. All i ever wanted to be was myself,naked in my truth standing tall while you wanted to watch me wither and crumble. I often wonder which move makes one of us the selfish one. I will rot inside this body before i ever let you make me less of a home to my own soul. -M.D.L

I love you.

I choke on my words, they are stuck where my uvula meets the back of my throat, being suffocated slowly. I gag wanting to release every word I could use to describe how I feel about you. They won’t come out and I’m stuck trying to make them appear on this paper like a magician at a street fair. I start with I love you but it doesn’t seem enough. I could throw up sonnets, fourteen lines confessing how I love you will never be enough but instead I choke on every syllable, every rhyme. I have so much to say to you but art can’t be rushed and I feel my throat collapsing in on itself like an accordion when I’m around you. I love you is too simple. You deserve the longest poem I have ever written, a spoken word night dedicated to the way you have trapped my heart inside your own rib cage. I love you won’t escape my lips because it doesn’t fit with how the way you look at me makes me feel. I love you drowns in my saliva and is swallowed whole because it will never amount to the way my soul dances with yours. I love you is suffocated until I can muster up the words to describe how my life is better with you in it. I love you is too simple. I will choke until words more meaningful bleed through this paper because I love you just simply isn’t enough. Our love is art and art can’t be rushed with words like I love you.

A good pair of gloves

He stood there slipping gloves over his hands. I watched as each finger found it’s rightful place inside. He flexed his fingers back and forth testing to see if the gloves were a perfect fit, if they felt like home. I watched him try on gloves and wondered if he knew. If he knew how much I loved how particular he was. How everything had to feel like home to him or it wasn’t worth his time. I wondered if I felt like home to him, if he tried me on like a pair of snug gloves and sighed with relief when he discovered that I’m more than my skin. That he could sink into me and feel a sense of comfort. I pull him away from the gloves and hug him tight as if to say there’s warmth in me too. As if to remind him that I’m also a good choice that he once spent time making. He tries on every pair of gloves in the store as I watch, fingers sliding in, flexing back and forth. I wonder which ones he will pick and if he will be happy with them when they have to be truly tested. When they are up against the elements. I wonder if he’s happy with me when our relationship is tested, when we are up against the elements. Our relationship is like a nice pair of gloves that we both slipped on, fingers flexing, testing for comfort.

I am just skin

I feel like a Halloween pumpkin, all carved out and hollow. All that is left of me is this skin. I have never had thick skin. It’s all thin and frigid around the edges, curling in on itself. There’s not much left of me here inside. I gave away my soul long ago, passing fragments of it out like candy on a crisp fall evening. This soul belongs to the trees, to the dirt, sinking so far away from me I can no longer grasp it in my clutches and urge myself to not let go. I’m all skin, wrinkly, woven by molecules choosing everyday to weave themselves together. I gave my soul away a long time ago to the thud of heartbeats and the feeling of the first snow fall. I gave my soul to the overwhelming joy of my father coming home and welcoming us at the door. I’m just this skin fragile, as delicate as the spider webs that blanket the front porch of my childhood home. This soul is long gone, given to the feeling that warm tea gives my insides, given to the way it feels like home when I hug my mother. All that is left is this skin, wrapped around nothingness and tangled within itself. My soul was given to the feeling in the pit of my stomach as I dipped my feet into the vast ocean for the first time, given to the way it feels when a kiss lingers a little longer than expected. I am just skin. My soul was given to the way my brother tilts his head back when he laughs at my jokes, given to the tickling feeling of feet tangled within blades of grass for the first time. I am just skin. My soul was fragmented into pieces and encompasses beautiful moments of my life. I am just skin, how lucky am I.

Notes for my guardian angels

To feel grief so deeply shows how much love we are capable of. Grief is disguised as the greatest form of love there is. To ache for someone, to miss someone so much your soul feels like shattered glass. That’s how I know love conquers all because it can bring so much pain in the form of loss. Grief proves that love exists in astounding quantities, that we can love each other until our soul feels like it’s going to erupt. Love doesn’t come without grief or loss because it’s both of those things. Love is all. Grief means I love you, I will keep loving you until the end of time in unmeasurable amounts. You may not be here physically but within my heart there’s fires you have lit that ache and burn like a thousand suns. Grief reminds me of this everyday, of the love I have for you. The love that resides forever in my soul. Thank you for allowing me to know grief because with it comes love, with grief comes reminders that love is all consuming and so worth every ounce of hellish pain I feel now that your gone. Grief is the all mighty price I’ll pay for loving so deeply. Grief is love. Thank you to all my guardian angels for the unmeasurable amount of love. 💔 🕊️ 😇