What’s for dinner?

It's three in the afternoon I’m draping my arm around yours as you push the shopping cart around the store. My legs feel like jello as I try to match your speed. You were blessed with legs that can cover over half the ground that mine can. I feel you pulling me in different directions, asking me what I want for dinner and I feel an overwhelming pit in my stomach. I can’t answer simple questions, not today. I feel like I can’t answer simple questions any day, my mind is bogged down and useless. Ask me one more time what I want for dinner and I might scream until the whole grocery store knows that I have no fucking clue. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault I’m this way. You know I can’t make decisions and you see the crazy crossing over my face like a tidal wave. You stop the cart and stare at me. God why do you have to stare at me like you know all of my secrets? I’m an open book to you. You know me well. Next thing I know I’m in your arms and I’m in tears because I can’t make decisions and I’m failing to hide my crazy. Dammit, there’s a woman behind you staring at me and I want to ask if she’s ever had a breakdown over choosing what’s for dinner, if she’s ever been so overwhelmed that it all just wells up in her chest until it comes out in rage. These are rage tears. Rage, rage, rage. Rage for the damn question “what’s for dinner?” I know many women have been asked this before me and many have answered with I don’t know. I know many men have asked this question in frustration because we can’t answer the simplest question. There’s fucking memes about this shit. I feel the tears growing more into rage because life’s too filled with these little decisions that I must make. I’m overworked, over questioned, under qualified for this type of pressure. I make all these little stupid decisions all day everyday. My eyes lock onto yours and I can see it on your face, my crazy is showing. My hands are bawled into fists and my forehead is sweating. The tears have stopped now and you’re still holding me like you’re afraid if you let go I might explode like the ticking time bomb that I am. You finally release me when you realize I have gone limp. Defeated. Utterly defeated and exasperated. I’m a hot mess and I can feel it. Tears are seeping into my skin and smeared across your shirt. I feel embarrassed now not only for myself but for you. You, the glue that holds me together. You are just standing there telling me it’s okay, it will be okay bewildered about what just took place on isle 4. Me, a bawled up mess and you a sturdy rock to lean on. We stand there staring at each other, the lady who was staring at me has since found some other excitement, maybe it’s the sale on croissants that has caught her eye. I’m glad I’m less exciting now. Now I want to crawl back into the hole that is my flesh and drape it over me like a warm blanket. I needed something, someone to coddle me like the newborn I was being. I needed you and you were there, witnessing my downfall. I broke. The question what’s for dinner finally broke me into tiny little pieces and spilled my soul onto the floor beneath my feet. It was all too much. Being a woman feels like too much. Hell being a human feels like too much. There’s a lot of too much and not enough and now I feel empty. I wipe my tears off my face and stare up at you apologetically. How do we recover from this? You smile at me and tell me again that it’s all going to be okay. I sigh a heavy sigh of relief, thank god you haven’t given up on me yet. I lock my arm back into yours and we continue or grocery trip, you not asking me again what’s for dinner and me pretending that my breakdown was an answer to the question. Sometimes that is the answer to the questions isn’t it? Aren’t we all just one question away from a breakdown? One push, one slight tilt and we are falling overboard into madness. Im grateful I didn’t have to go through that alone. I’m grateful that you understand what it means to be a little unhinged at times. This life is full of questions and I won’t always have the answers and sometimes “I don’t know” seems like an acceptable response to me because sometimes we just don’t have a fucking clue. -M.D.L

Bear or man in the woods?

I don’t want to run into a bear or a man in the woods. I want to run into the way my best friend hugs me when it feels like things cant possibly get any worse. I want to run into an actual man, like the one I’m about to marry. The one who cherishes the ground I walk on just because I walk on it. One who has no motives but to love me. Let me run into the coffee shop down the street, the one who never fails to make my coffee just the way I like it. I want to run into hopes arms like she has done nothing but support me in all my endeavors. Let me run into any dark space, dark forest, dark alleyway like I’m the scariest thing in it because I am the bear, wild and unpredictable. -M.D.L

The luckiest day

Today is said to be the luckiest day of the year. A couple days ago i had my whole body submerged in the steaming water of a hot pot in the middle of no where while a beautiful soul of a woman said to be a channeler told me I have a great purpose on this earth and that felt pretty lucky to me. Last night i danced around the kitchen to the lime in a coconut song with powerful women who have supported and raised me my whole life, that felt pretty lucky to me. I don’t know really know what the definition of “lucky” is I guess if you google it the definition says “having, bringing or resulting from good luck.” Which is funny to me, the word I’m trying to define being in the definition. Today is said to be the luckiest day of the year but I have felt lucky before like the first time he kissed me and it felt like a storm washing over my body. Luck is said to be brought on by chance, not one’s actions but I feel like I have made my own luck. Luck feels like it’s been brewed inside me and instilled into my core since birth. I mean, look at this world, this beautiful, soul aching world I was given. It’s the luckiest day of the year but to be honest I feel pretty damn lucky in all these little moments that have made me. -M.D.L

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.