I love you and I need you here now. I love you and I love you, so don’t go too far before you come back. I love you and I will follow you wherever because I love you and I love you and I love you and I will love you every day for the rest of my life.

It seems like everyone is lonely lately. Here’s a list of pieces of advice I’d like to give people:

• So you’re transgendered. Your vagina is not a burden you have to bear, it’s a life experience. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you’re fat. If you don’t want to be, change it; if you’re okay with it, stay that way. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you were raped two years ago. You’re a survivor and any guy who looks at you like damaged goods instead of a strong fucking woman is a dick. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you want to be a housewife when you grow up. Some people dig that and some don’t. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you smoke weed. There are people in this world who don’t want to date people who do drugs. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you came from a low-income family. Any person worth dating isn’t going to write you off just because you don’t come from money. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.
• So you have a baby. That’s a big responsibility for your partner to take on and they might not want to do it. Your child is now a part of who you are. You don’t want to date someone who isn’t okay with who you are anyway.

Are we seeing a pattern?

A while ago, I asked my sister what she thought it meant to be “in love” and she said, “Well, I guess I think it’s someone you want to be around all the time. Like, you never get tired of them.” I laughed. Honestly, I did. Because in Dante’s Inferno, the punishment for those who have committed adultery is to have to be with that person for the rest of eternity. Always being with someone is a punishment with some pretty old evidentiary support. So I laughed and I told her there was no one you would ever want to be around all the time.

But I was wrong. Dante was wrong. It was all wrong.

You can miss someone who has only been gone for ten minutes. You can miss someone even before they leave. 

And tonight is the night when I listen to Down by Jay Sean and remember that things change, but you can always go back or the past catches up to you or something happens where you’re still the same as you were before. I just mean to say that I’ll never be someone else - not if I wanted to be, not if I hated myself, not if I ran away desperately trying to be different. No, who we are never really goes away. All we can do is cherish that person, hold them close to our hearts and look upon them with kindness and forgiveness.

I guess I just don’t know what to say when people tell me they hope I “get better.” This, how I am now, is so much better than how I used to be. This is better. I know what I have to be thankful for, I know how many people love me, I know how lucky I am. I may not be perfect, but I am better so, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to say to you.

for staying open long enough for me to get through it. And I thanked those people on the sidewalk handing me flyers I didn’t want. And I thanked my printer for printing and my pillow for being cozy and I don’t know why I’m thanking everything, but it has something to do with knowing I’ve been given the greatest gift of my life - you.

There was once a young girl hidden in a forest

Another boy kissed me at the cafe.
I laughed in a bitter, unattractive way.
It’s not funny that we fell through
Or that apologies and roses won’t bring me back to you.
It’s the stories they told us when we were young -
How to wake Snow White with a fiery tongue,
How happiness lies in earning another’s love
And wishes come true if you dream hard enough.

until a prince heard her singing to a friendly songbird

That’s the way they told it to me,
Boy saves girl and they live ever after happily,
But I’ve noticed it seems a bit of a lie
And I’m pissed I’ll never find that guy.
No, boy meets boy and their parents tear them apart
Or girl meets girl and she’s afraid to start.
We all end up at home watching microwaves turn,
Drinking vodka from a teacup and asking when we’ll learn.

so he whisked her off to his kingdom on his horse

Prince Charming is overrated at best,
But from the movies and the stories you’d have never guessed.
He struts in the room with a hero’s smile,
All the while pushing his princess down the aisle.
But what if the princess wanted to wait,
To appreciate being awake, to control her own fate?
If she begged him not to force her, would the story break?
And when he leaves, I wonder how much did he take?

and the kingdom was readied to receive their new princess. 

I add up the times I’ve sat too close to
men I had no intention of pleasing and laughed,
head thrown back like a broken neck, hand
slipping down the inside of their thighs,
and watched them calculate the probability
of getting laid and weigh those chances
against the friction building in their slacks,
and multiply that by the number of borrowed
men’s dress shirts I sell to thrift stores every month
and divide the whole thing by the way
you counted every vertebra in my spine,
my derivative, tangent to my curves.

If I measure the distance between fucking
and loving, there’s an expanse of undefined space,
like an open dot on a calculus graph,
like the space between the asymptote and its axis,
Instead I might try to count seconds in a minute
or the number of gumballs in a jar
or the missing ships at the bottom of the ocean
or the interest owed on an unanswered text
or the numbers between zero and one.
I might try to make sense out of our parallel fingers,
or the perfect circle of a Venn diagram 
expressing where “we” comes out of “you” and “me.”

The acceleration of two falling bodies may be equal
but I’m far past “falling” for anyone. Subtract
the moonlight and the fragrance of air after rain
and kissing in cars. If you ask what I need
with the average wavelength in the ocean
and the cosine value of wet wood over 2π,
I’ll tell you I’m looking for the limit
where emerald meets aquamarine,
where the power of caffeine equals the power of coffee,
where the rays of sunlight travel through
bird cages and rib cages and form a cotangent
to the cycle of self-destruction within me.
I’ll tell you I’m looking for the radical algorithm
of falling in love measured by
the meaning of an ellipsis in the infinity of an answer.

i just want to feel you next to me
not even touching, just the weight of you in bed
or we could touch
and kiss and fuck and lay -
just lay together and i’ll feel the endorphins
swimming around in my head,
flooding it with the kind of happiness
they write books about
i just want to cuddle
and hold your hand
and say embarrassing things you think are cute
and overwhelm you with just how much
i love you
endlessly 

Told you we’d make a run for it
In an old Cadillac
Told you we’d make a run for it
And we’re not coming back

Toothpaste kisses, late night wishes
Talking sweet, forgetting my name
Toothpaste kisses, late night wishes
Talking sweet, forgetting my answers

Jump that train, lie through your teeth,
Dance on the roof, come home to me
Jump that train, lie  through your teeth
Dance on the roof, come home to me

Told you we’d make a run for it
In an old Cadillac
Told you we’d make a run for it
And we’re not coming back 

Let’s not forget that life is too mesmerizing, too unpredictable, too intricate, too beautiful, too rewarding, too warm to worry about anything.

You’re the reason the flowers come loose and turn into butterflies. You’re the reason stars swim in sun rays. You’re the magic in the world.

So I love the way he grows out his hair because his mommy loves the curls. And I love that when we sleep, we face away from each other because we don’t need to touch to know how much we love each other, but if one of us wakes up in the middle of the night, we roll over and kiss the other person’s shoulder just to remind them that we’re still there. I love the silly grin that splits across his face after he tells a joke and that he’ll laugh at himself even if no one else does. I love that he memorized my favorite flower before we even started dating “just in case.” I love the way his hand fits perfectly in mine and if I were to run across the room and jump into his arms, he’d take it in stride, like he was expecting that all along.

When I say I’ll love him forever if he’ll let me, I watch them roll their eyes and smile. And maybe I would too if I were them, but there’s something in my fingers that tells me I’m being terrifyingly honest, the kind of honesty that gets you in trouble, the only kind that risks anything.