My love

Sometimes the love I have for you gets trapped inside my body. It can’t escape my lips to form perfect poetic sonnets and crucifies itself on my uvula instead. It can’t pour out of my fingertips to touch your skin, perfectly, lightly causing goosebumps to rise on your arms like mountains. I am not the best lover, I’m lost in deep madness often which can shift and bend thoughts inside my head like a forever turning kaleidoscope. I want the love to escape me, to land on you softly caressing your soul because you deserve the world or at least the sacrificial giving of my soul. I love you through it all, the shifting and bending of my mind. I love you when my words say differently, when my volume is turned up and spitting anger from my lips at you for insignificant things. Even then, my heart whispers love, love, love trying to calm the passion that rages and boils in my gut. Love is tricky inside this body of mine. My body is greedy, afraid and menacing, it wants to keep the love I made to itself, avoiding vulnerability. The love inside me is refusing to be strangled and mauled by fear, it fights to escape and regurgitate itself to you. It was made for you, this love inside me. It escapes in bits and pieces, in fragments of “have a good day”, “drive safely”. My love for you is deep and I feel it here often, it exists and it comes in big waves to remind me. In case this love never escapes in the way I want it to, in case you don’t feel it deep within the marrow of your bones, I hope you know I’m choking on the love I have for you all the time. My soul screams to touch yours. Because with out love we have nothing -M.D.L

Perception is key

I loved you even when I didn’t and I think there’s magic in that. Loving someone simply for the version you created of them is a testament to how badly we can yearn for something. Love always has to be a “despite all the odds” kind of thing, even the odds we turn our blinders on for then ask why we were so blind. I saw no odds just you in good lighting, your soul tilted just right. Loving you was never hard, the relationship between you and my brain made it easy. The power our brains have over every inch of our reality is suffocating, squeezing out every inch of the truth and replacing it with smoke and mirrors. Perception is a son of a bitch. Twisting, turning, weaving lies that may be truths or truths that may be lies. I never knew where the version I made up of you started and the real you ended. Maybe that’s the problem with make believe, it eventually rots into reality. I wonder what version of you you’d be if I didn’t concoct this mirage of you in head. My heart has finally shouted imposter....The charade is now over. It can’t trick itself any longer you are you and I am me and our love depends on the perception of it all.

The pieces that built me

I mourn for the parts of me that I didn’t know I lost. The parts that I have shoved my fingers deep down into myself to find; wiggled around, searching for something. For healing? For understanding? I shove my fingers deep, down in the trenches of me until they are covered with blood, until I scream out loud with agony. I have to feel something, is this it? Is this what’s buried deep down in my soul? It comes up sometimes; the pieces, like vomit onto my living room floor only it’s not vomit. It’s tears that flood and flood mixed with dry heaving that prevents me from breathing. I cried an ocean once, or at least it felt like it. My living room carpet was wet, my hair, my perfectly done make up staining my cheeks. I cried so much I wished someone would send a life boat to my door step or open the door and let all the water out. I can’t understand these pieces or maybe I don’t want to. Is this pain? Sadness? Anger? Where does it come from? So deep within me that half the time I don’t realize it’s there until it is... like a long car ride to a new home in some new place you have never been with your trunk full of luggage. Like showing up for yourself for the first time but not knowing you were missing in the first place. I didn’t know these parts of me were missing. The vulnerable, sad, pained, scared parts. Where do they go when Im not forced to let them out? I have so many different parts. My fingers could explore my own body for days and never even touch the depths of what’s inside. That’s a scary concept, being a stranger to bits and pieces of your own being. What parts of me is this? What if I get stuck here in the version of myself that cries oceans and heaves up nothing but air on my living room floor with the blinds closed? What would people think then? What would people think of me If this door didn’t exist? If there wasn’t walls or windows protecting my insides, like my own perfect house. My grass is green, my bushes pruned every year but what if my roots are rotting? What if there’s worms,spiders, and weeds? What if my very foundation is cracking? Would they choose to sit in my garden then? To lay down on my grass and stare into my sun? To step inside for tea and deep conversations? Would I? Maybe that’s the important question: would I still choose to see the beauty in all these pieces of myself? The beauty in this house I built? If I cried rivers to water this grass..and let cracks roam in my foundation would I still love me then? I keep digging around inside, grabbing around for something tangible, for something that makes sense of all these pieces. Information that makes sense of how I can be so whole yet need so many internal repairs. The only thing I discovered is that I must step inside and have tea and deep conversations with myself more often. -M.D.L

Heart Shaped Stickers

There is a shop down the street from me that repairs broken hearts and shattered dreams. A little old man runs it and provides hugs for 50 cents. He wears khaki pants and a smile as people past him and his shop. He once told me that I'm shattered, sad, and broken but that he could fix me. He told me that I am the reason love and pain are both four letter words. He told me I was born from pain and ran over by love, but he the master, he had this handled. He put red heart shaped stickers all over my chest and told me that it would make me feel whole again. He was right, it did but after a couple weeks the stickers started to curl around the edges and fall off onto the ground. Shattering all my hopes and dreams of being whole again. The little old man in khakis told me that in order to fix what was shattered I had to remember what loss was like. He said to me "you have to find the love within the loss and pain. You have to remember that the things, the people you cherish, they change. I did not fix you because you were already whole. You are half pain and half love and that is true for all magical things. You just needed some more hearts to cherish to remind you of this. If you wish to feel more whole, share more love, the devastation, the pain of heartbreak does not matter because the feelings of joy that love brings you is everlasting. There are many more heart shaped stickers in the world to love, I hope you find them. -M.D.L

The darkness within

There is a place in my soul where the light never touches. It's dark and chaotic. There is fog there that lingers and settles at the bottom. I like to think the dark sits by my tailbone, waiting to creep up. I operate from this dark place sometimes. It feels less like me and more like someone else running my body. I am rugged and ruthless, sad and broken. I am my own abuser. I lead with the worst of me when this dark place becomes my beaconing center. I feel death and loneliness like we have always been best friends, holding hands and skipping through this life as one. It's dark here in this part of my soul and I drown in it, overcome with nothing but angst. My life becomes someone else's to live and I want so bad to not be a part of it any longer. I wish to melt into the darkness and let it take me. The other part of my soul lives here in this body of mine too, the light part. It barges in with flashlights on ready to take away the dark, ready to be a shining beacon of hope. It sits in my chest and resides there. Its a savior full of perseverance and optimism for the fate of the future me. It's unwilling to let the dark succumb, unwilling to give up. I'm terrified for the day that it does. The day where the light in me dies, the flashlights are turned off and there is no more saving. What will I become when there is no light left in me? When there's no more saving my soul that I can muster? I get close to seeing the lights turned off, the batteries are dying and the flashlights must be shaken to turn back on. Flickering, flickering. I get close to wanting it all to end. I stand at the edge of my darkness and think about diving in. There is always a piece of me though, the light within me that refuses to burn out, to fade. This is what I fight for who I fight for, I beg for the light in the middle of my own personal darkness. I pray that there will always be the piece of me that thinks I am worth saving, the piece that has the light turned on. I pray that I always believe that I am worth more than my darkness. I pray that there is always a glimmer of light left to fight. I find both terror and contentment in knowing there is no light here, without the darkness. -MDL.

I asked God

I asked God why he is taking you he said he couldn't say, all he knew was you are too sick to stay. I asked God why he's taking you, he said he knew you were special since you were a little boy, that you brought so many people in your life so much joy. I asked God why you had to go, he told me that it was time that the pain you are feeling is a crime. I asked God why you have to go, he told me that you deserved much more, that he wanted you in heaven, to go and explore. I asked God what to do now that you are not here, he told me that you are, that I hold you very near. I asked God what is plan is for you, he told me its much bigger than this life, that you will be able to build blanket forts without much strife. I asked God what his plan is for you, he told me that its grand, that you have more meant for you than this life had planned. I asked God these questions because I miss you so. Deep down I wish you did not have to go. I know its time for you, you have to leave. God is calling your name, and pulling on your sleeve. I look up to you and all that you did achieve. I am so thankful that you were here, that I got to call you grandpa, that I got to hold you near. Thank you for being my hero and teaching me so many things. Im so happy for all the memories and joy that thinking of you brings. I will miss you each and every day. You were a great man in every single way. I hope you Rest In Peace until I see you again, yours truly, your best friend. -MDL

An Anthem, A hallelujah song

He thinks that he deserves an anthem, a hallelujah song while he touches women in ways that he thought others couldn't. He deserves options and women to claw at his hardened heart in heat. A woman who gets down on her knees and proves her worthiness to him. A woman taken for granted, wanting, ready, waiting. A woman blinded by heavy breathing and tangled up sheets; wrapped around legs that are wrapped around each other. A woman who obeys and pleases, never says no. He thinks he deserves more than he is worth of. A prize, all access to sweet insides and nights spent moaning. He thinks he deserves one night stands filled with one hello and one goodbye. Meetings in the back of the car that leave windows foggy and her gone by the ending. Less talking, more doing. He thinks he deserves these moments where she lets him deep inside her only sacred space. He is not worthy. He is not worthy of spaces that feel the most. The parts of her body that are most vulnerable. He is not worthy of legs spread open, waiting, wanting. He is not worthy of her on her back while he does what he pleases. Not worthy of moaning, tangled up sheets with no sunrise spent together promised. He will not buy her flowers, leave her cute notes, or kiss her cheek when she is feeling down. He will not stay forever or stay until they grow old together. He has nothing to give for an all access VIP pass. He has nothing to give her for the sacrifice of her sacred place. He has nothing to giver her yet he deserves an anthem, a hallelujah song for what? This is not solely a mans job, dedicated to those who have a penis. He deserves nothing for he is not worthy. He has nothing more to offer than she can already give. She deserves an anthem, a hallelujah song.