Better than being alone

“This strand of hair,” he slides his finger and thumb back and forth as the other piece of her hair fall away until there’s a single one left in his grip, “this one right here.  I love this strand of hair as much as I love every other strand of hair on your head.  Just as much as I love every freckle on your body and every angle of your curves.”

They were uncomfortably close, she thought.  Their foreheads only a whisper apart.  She could feel his breath along her neck and shoulder.  His eyes were too intense and she couldn’t take it, so she laughed it off nervously.

“You’re just-, no.  I’m-, um, thank you,” she shook her head trying to free her single strand from his pincer grip but he wouldn’t let go.

“It’s true.  All of it.  There are so many things about you that make me hunger to touch you.  To kiss you.  I can’t stop myself sometimes.”

His words weren’t helping her nervousness.  He always says them and they’re very nice things to say, but she can’t help but feel as if they’re just words with no meaning.  She doesn’t understand how anyone could say those things about her.  She’s nobody.  She’s nothing special.  All she wants to do is hide and he’s holding her up telling everyone to look.  It’s as if he doesn’t know her and makes the words he says feel painful and awkward.

She tilted her head away and pull the strand of hair from him, “I have to go.”

He grabbed her hand and held her, “you don’t seem as if you believe me.  After all this time and all the times I’ve professed my love for you.  The times we’ve made love and the times we’ve kissed.  The laughs we’ve shared and intimate moments, you still doubt that I love every inch of you?”

She sighed, “just don’t.  I-, of course, yes.  I do.”

He shook his head, “I don’t believe you.”

“Well what do you want me to say?”  He pushed her too far and the dam broke and the waters came flooding out.
“That I don’t think you’re sincere.  You say the words that you love me but you never seem to understand anything about me.  That when I laugh I do it out of nervous energy.  That when we fucked it’s because your hands wouldn’t stop.  When we kissed it was your mouth forced down my throat.  You’ve never known me, you’ve only ever known what you wanted and took it.  You never stopped to read my reaction to any of it.  You may say you love every inch of me, but only when you want something that I can give you at that moment whether I want it or not.”

He stared at her blankly and spoke without emotion, “so why are you with me then?”

“Because I don’t want to be alone.  I don’t want to be sad and think I’ll never find anyone so I would rather take someone who seems insincere but is nice about it.  I’d rather have a relationship I’m disappointed in than none at all.  And that might seem fucked up to you but, again, you don’t know anything about me so I’m not surprised you don’t realize that I would want that.”

That fake color blue

The sky isn’t blue and neither are you.

You’re a scattered reflection.

A person you thought I wanted you to be,

stretched to a person you aren’t,

to get closer to me.

The sun isn’t yellow, it’s as white as your lies.

Small lies that don’t mean much to anyone,

aside from the person you’re lying to.

 

The Things We Do To Our Kids

We give our children our voice without knowing it.
and they sound just like us.

The intonations.

The verbiage.

Thought processes.

Values and beliefs.

Even those that rebel can’t escape it.
They all end up in some capacity like the blank slate before them.
Weather does that to everything over time.
You can’t deny nature without great effort.

The things we do to our kids aren’t right.

Simply through living we tell them how to live and how others should live.

In our own biases we give them bias.
In our own hates we birth hate.
In our own love we birth love.

All of this through the words we choose so carelessly because we don’t know the impact they have.

Some do though, I guess.
Some realize the hate they give and the love they dole.
Some are aware of the biases they keep alive through another generation.

A mama’s boy and daddy’s little man.
Daddy’s princess and mama’s little girl.
All they want to do is please and when its all they know it’s so hard to come out of what’s ingrained inside of you.

You grow up knowing whats right and whats wrong through a keyhole.
It’s amazing what you see when you open the door.

 

Smoke And Mirrors, The Good Kind

Lie to me.  Tell me a bunch of truths that you know aren’t real, but please make it convincing.  I don’t ever want to know that I’m being lied to.  I don’t ever want to know what you really think.  I don’t ever want to know what you’ll really do.  The only thing I do know is that I never want to hear it.

Make them sweet.  The left over fondant from a grandiose cake that I can’t help but pick and pull at.  Halloween night, after the tricks.  Make it green.  Pour your lies like honey into my ear.  From your lips I can’t see through the thickness.

I hope they’re bulletproof.  They can’t be Swiss cheese lies, full of holes that my over active mind can dance through to find reality.  Don’t paint them with convoluted colors of bright and shiny, but also make sure they aren’t too dark or dreary.  Slip them in my lunch between the apple and the goldfish so I’ll nibble at them throughout the day and not notice how they’re coated in falsehoods.

Can you do that for me?  Lie to me in the most glorious way.

Why?  Because a lie is always better than the truth.  The truth is you looking at me and saying words that hurt.  Painful pricks from a needle until your hand gets tired or my face begins to bleed.  One of us will find the exit using truth as our guide.  You can’t hide from truth’s flashlight.  Why still?  Because in a lie there are truths but these truths are only the best parts of us.  Lie to me and keep us at our best so we can never be anything else.