ORIGINAL POEMS

AJ ROSE

a love letter where i say goodbye at the end

(and this time i mean it)

here's my side of the river

how strange it is to love something only when it's gone

Dear Heart, i said

(come home to me)

© Tessier-Ashpool S.A. All rights reserved.

a love letter where i say goodbye at the end

(and this time i mean it)

"There's an elephant in this room," you say.

"There's an elephant in every room we occupy," I remind you.

I can't help it, I go soft when I see your face and despite hating myself for it I miss you, and I want to make things right.

It's why I wish distance was something either of us could create, something that could build up between us and maybe set my broken bones, heal my bleeding wounds into scars. I don't know if I believe that time is a cure for all bad things, but I crave it. I well and truly ache for time away from you.

I think part of me is doomed to loving you.

And it sucks because it wasn't ever, like, desire or something, it was just always there. Something I knew I'd have to tell you about anyway, something I never wanted to tell you about.

Here's my I'm sorry:
the thousand things I wished I'd done differently that sit heavy in my gut, that space right below my ribs and above my intestine, poke and prod and make it hard to breathe sometimes — guilt is something I'd always felt heavy, always felt at the tiniest things. My shortcomings are what I'm most aware of, insecurities you don't look to acknowledge.

I felt that I loved you too much, and I knew, intrinsically, I'd have to backpedal to save myself — create a space between us to cushion the blow when you inevitably left. But learning that my paranoia, my terror of getting hurt was the thing that pulled us apart, that made me laugh. Irony was never something I'd been good at.

Here's the other side of it:
you're supposed to know who I am but most days you look at me like I'm a stranger, and like you've forgotten what I look like when I cry. All you believe about me these days are the muted half-lies told through walls of plaster and metal. It's this thing where you remember echos of who I am and simplified versions of my character, boiling me down to the evil witch trope, calling me bitchy and rude for having an opinion and being unafraid to sneer at bullshit. You've locked yourself in a cage of misogynistic retorts and thoughts and forgotten the other side of the coin.

I put you on a train and I watched from the platform as it pulled away, staring through the snowflakes as it chugged off, taking you to God knows where without even a goodbye.

I've said it before and what really stings is that you never even said it back, that you remember imprints of me, blurry memories hazed out by time and your own idiocy, and I remember with sharp clarity every good and bad thing about you.

There are no photos of us in our home — our home: the memory of you watching me play guitar and liking the sound of it as you lulled to sleep; the memory of us sitting in the car in the cold, sharing a jacket and fogging up the windows breathing; the memory of walking in the snow and laying down on the street to make angels; the memory of sitting on the couch in silence, not moving, curled up in each other and watching the raindrops slide down the window.

Every sentence I say to you are more words I wish I could take back. There's nothing in this world that I can seem to get right with you even though I've tried so hard. It's so reminiscent of Icarus it makes me mad — the thing I'm doomed to love is also the thing I'm doomed to fail.

Here it goes, the worst night and morning and week and month on instant replay, but every word coming out of your mouth back then sounds exactly like every word coming out now, and I can't pinpoint the moment of my destruction. Or if I'm letting it happen again and again because there's no distance here, nothing for me to hide behind, no one of us to become, people to please. Or (most likely) if my destruction has been dragged out into a year, that it's never really stopped.

You told me you know pain. I wanted to scream at you that you don't, that you'll never care the way I do. That's always the difference between you and me. You don't bleed. I bleed too heavy.

Here's an anecdote:
the way atoms work is through attraction, simple and easy, numbers and math. One atom has something it can give another atom, or something it can share, or something it needs to take. My atoms needed you for some reason. I don't know if that was the logical part or what happened, but having our bond forcibly ripped apart — doesn't that hurt you? (No, don't answer that. I'm afraid of what you'll say.)

The truth is I think we need to talk about the elephant in the room lest it stay and grow, but we won't. We won't. Because I don't know how to ask and you don't know how to reach for it.

The truth is I think you're unaware of your affect on me, but how could you be, it's so visceral and unpleasant. You've always owned a space in my head.

I always liked the definition of prerequisite more than intrinsic, but they are, for all intents and purposes, almost an identical word.

You don't know where I go inside my head and for all the years that we were close, that I let you into the darkest parts of my life, I'm glad you never got into here. It's an ugly place. I've broken my hand against walls in here. It exists now, in my peripheral. It's like it's beckoning, telling me to break your ugly face.

So, here's to the things I hope for above all else: our distance and our demise, and your eyes on mine.

AJ ROSE

I wrote this poem when I was having a really hard time coming to terms with the loss of a friendship. It was a friendship I'd had for a long time, one that was very important to me, one that fell apart in spectacular fashion.
I had all these feelings I couldn't communicate to the other party, all these I'm sorrys all saved up. I had all these angry moments, memories of all the times I'd been wronged, all these memories of reconciling after a bad fight and it made me angry to see how i was always the one desperate to fix the things between us.
I sent him the link to it. I don't know if he read it.

here's my side of the river

it's hard to be angry even when i want to be angry because everything — even the trees (especially the trees) — reminds me of you.

i feel trapped in my own skin.

and it's easy to pretend that i'm fine because I've pretended all my life—

not every poem I've written was about you (in truth, only one other was) but i think I've written everything at you

some lesson that i wanted you to learn (needed you to learn) — but you could never look between the spaces of the words.

you've never known how to look a little longer, a little harder, you've never seen the intent behind a painting.

it's frustrating to me because I've spent all of my life pretending, and I've spent all of it knowing.

i know the second faces and the quirks and i look behind, beyond, for just a little longer

and i care so much and i care so deeply — something neither of us are sure you know how to do — and all the time, I've seen the spaces between everyone's words.

and you couldn't ever figure out how to do that for me

like i said before: it's not that i assume you don't care, it's that i know you care less than me, that you don't know how to do it right, that you never know what to say
and maybe that's your curse and that's mine
i'll always have to knowingly inflict heartbreak on people, i'll always have to be just a little bit detached, i'll always have to care a little bit harder
and you will unwittingly ruin lives, trailing destruction like a hurricane, and you will never find home in another person.

maybe it's this conviction of mine (the knowing that if you do not learn how to know, you will always break more hearts — like you broke mine — and you might never be happy) is what keeps us from reconciling
but like i said before: this is an old song, a tired baseline, played on repeat for almost six years and i'm ready for a brand new dance.

i saw the pattern back then, but i got on the floor (one more dance, i'd thought, it can't hurt) and now I've broken my leg, my ribs, my arm
(it was a car crash, in the end, not a dance)
but the heartbreak is just a side affect of having a tender heart.

— these are the things they don't teach us in school, for if we knew we'd have nothing to be afraid of —

poetry used to slip on me like a second skin, familiar and safer than anything I've ever known

but, somehow, when you wrecked my life you wrecked the part of me that could work out how to express emotion.

and when i met you i thought maybe we'd bring out the best in each other, but you didn't change anything in me, except now that i know to trust less.

and i'm sorry i keep bringing it up, round and around like a ferris wheel — "why? why? why?" — but i guess i'm just aching too much to settle with "i don't know"
it doesn't matter, anymore, that "i'm sorry" i needed to hear months ago, that non-answer you gave me that once while it was raining.

you know the drill, i guess, pack up, i'll go to the hospital.

maybe in the morning we'll do it again.

but that's not it, is it? it's not the end of the crusade; it's never the end for me because between the two of us who suffers more? maybe every night is the end for you, maybe you don't see we stumble right into it again.

i used to equate you to a song: a wild beat, a slow chord progression, steady on, steady up into a long, groaning crescendo
then a sudden drop
the lights flickering out
(into black)
and maybe there's a guitar, maybe there's a trumpet and a drum set, maybe there's a thousand instruments but truly, truly none of them really compare to you
and that's the part that makes me angriest - that you are still so bright and i barely even know how to glimmer.

everything is the grand story of someone, something, and i guess i was meant to be the grand story of you.

i don't know if you can hear the tired anger, the righteous exhaustion behind this poem, but i want to stop.

i need a new song.

and i'll watch you grab your dancing shoes like always and i'll hate myself a little more like always.

but maybe i'll say no, maybe i'll stop
and i'll step away
(the music rises, tenses, the strings go taught under the pressure, the flutes expel every last shred of air in their lungs)
and i'll pick a new song
(the crescendo falls, all at once, glorious and beautiful and about damn time)
maybe i'll finally be alone.
(the music is the softest diminuendo)

how strange it is to love something only when it's gone

how strange it is to love something only when it's gone.

the way your hair shined,
in the light,
as the sun climbed over the hill,
and through our window,
ceaselessly.

how you laughed as you
danced around the kitchen,
whatever was on the radio
the beat you'd chose to breathe to.

the way i'd never realized i couldn't be me without you
until you were without me.

(how strange it is to love something only when it's gone.)

the way i long for your touch when i'm nothing but
hollow,
hollow,
empty.

how i never knew it was always you,

(you, always)

until there was no longer an us.

how strange it is to love something only when it's gone.

AJ ROSE

I wrote this at three a.m. after yet again losing a friendship I'd loved when Emily Dickinson possessed me and ghostwrote the line "how strange it is to love something only when it's gone" because, seriously, I couldn't have done that one my own.

Dear Heart, i said

(come home to me)

Here we are again:
once again,
opposite sides of the country, alone, aching for each other.

here we are again, riding the veins of a country that's spent its life trying to circumvent the distance it's built.

distance is something heavy between us,
something that shouldn't hold as much weight as it does.

i never wanted it for you or for me.
like a wedge driven between two bricks, warped together with mortar.

here, distance is the enemy, distance is the killer. But here is another thing: i created this distance, too.

i told you once that i felt like leaving my home town, that i have dreams where i never come back.
here's why:
love is what makes us come home.

i am afraid so i run, i love too hard and too much and i've been hurt before — distance is roads between us.

distance is something safe and, darling, sweetheart, my love, i am so sorry that it is my comfort.

love is what makes us come home.

and here's another thing:
that urge to flee has left my body, welled up and dissolved with every touch, every kiss, every word.

i have found that it is not because I want to stay where i am that distance has gone away — that i have finally stopped being afraid — but because home is full of love for the first time in my life.

we spend our lives driving roads, i spend my dreams driving forever, the whole time circumventing distance.

Looking to come home.