mandalu is fall(ing)

Your words wrap around my neck
like a noose that was not tied tight enough
to hang you up high enough,
and I can never seem to put my feelings
into sentences that are able
to make you see that I am absolutely
nothing without you.

See, there are a hundred languages
and a thousand different ways
that I could tell you that your smile,
in the morning, looks like breathing.
They cluck their tongues in some tribes,
they say ‘beautiful’ through hand movements
and eyelash flutters,
but I can only whisper it,
over and over,
against the corner of your mouth,
like a mantra or a prayer
‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’

But do you think love itself
could become its own language?
Could we use sympathy,
and stanzas to tell each other
that love is able to overcome
any obstacle,
and that when we are together
we are a match, we are striking
that we put forest fires to shame?

I realize, now, that we do not need
a hundred languages,
and we might not even need the one,
because when I look at you, with my eyes,
with my fondness, even for a second
I see you new, like it’s the first time
I learned how to speak.

(via 5000letters)

Each time I’m asked to tell about myself, I find myself starting the same way: “My name is Kelsey and I’m nineteen..”
but what I’d really like to say is:
“My name means island of the ships but once
I found a translation that said I’m a burning shipwreck-
not a burning ship but a ship that has caught fire
after the wreckage and well, I’d say that’s more fitting.”

I’ve learned that people don’t have time for about me’s.
They need two things: a name and an indication you’re someone special.

The doctors, they want facts not details.
“I broke my leg when I was three, it’s a funny story actually-“
The right or the left?
Conversation over.

The teachers, they want interests, hobbies.
You’re sad, yes, but what do you like to do?

The adults are a spew of questions.
What school do you go to? What classes are you taking?
What do you plan on becoming? Got a boyfriend?
No, stop.

People my own age are the worst.
“I’m planning on an English degree with a concentration in creative writing.”
Yeah, aren’t we all. So how many times have you, you know,
done it?

I’m pulled apart, my interests travelling highway 2
my goals at a stop light at traffic hour,
my medical history on a billboard for the world to see.
But what about me?

Where’s the chance to say,
“I hang on to fistfuls of poetry like loose change in my pockets,
and I keep waiting for the day that the world turns upside down
so I can swim with the stars.
I’m not afraid of darkness, it’s a loneliness I can empathize with it.
It’s the blackholes like cigarette burns inside of me that get troublesome.
I walk through graveyards and read the dashes between years,
each a story I’ll never know but sometimes
I create my own.”

No wonder none of us know who we are anymore.

(via wrestlingtheangel)