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Description
you’ve never seen a dolphin in real life,
or a bat, or a cow. your coffee is half milk,
but the way i drink my tea is sacrilegious to you.
your feet are always cold, your words always blunt.
you are not one to be poetic,
but i have a spray of freckles on my shoulders
and you tell me sometimes that it looks like
i’ve got the stars stenciled on my skin in constellations.
one looks like orion, you say, so i respond,
“the virgin’s lover,” and you say, “don’t be so judgmental,
you’re a mess of contradictions too. we all are.”

i like that line. i like how true it is, how you’re the first person
to ever tell me that i don’t have to be perfect,
or definite, or constant. how someone has finally understood that
a human being is a pile of delicately stacked miracles, a shift
of muscle under a pull of skin, a pair of lungs inhaling
a melody of ‘leave, leave, leave’ and exhaling a
plea to ‘stay, stay, stay.’ every word i speak is two-faced
and you’ll have to look in a mirror to understand
what i’m really trying to say.

i have bad days—i’m not talking
about those ‘bad days’ where i want to go
back to bed, i’m talking about those bad days
where i’m sixteen and don’t want to be anything at all.

but i have good days too, and i can’t describe
one of them to you, but i know you know what i mean,
those days that fill you up with a kind of wonder
as you look at the world and are amazed at how
big your heart must be to fit all of that in there.

so i want you to know:
my brain is a mess of knots, a tangled ball of
yarn that’s never gonna come out straight.
my morals are loose around my hands
but tight around my heart. given good music
and a strong engine, i could probably drive forever,
but i promise i will never want to walk away from you.

so here’s the red marker, here’s a couple of freckles.
tell me they’re stars, and i’ll tell you they’re bits of skin
that’ve had too much exposure to the sun on a girl who
sneaks out too much at night. maybe, eventually, we’ll both
find the beauty in that.