TeenHelp - april 8th, a love poem

just a sidenote, this may be triggering.

hi everyone! if u don't recognize my name, i was a rather frequent user of the forums back about six years ago and was on staff for a short time. mental illness and a self harm addiction brought me here, and i am happy to say that today i am just shy of a year and a half clean. blows my mind.

when i turned a year clean, i was doing these poetry prompts called escapril, and that particular day i was cued to write a love poem. this poem was the outcome, and it is without a doubt the best thing i've ever written. it even inspired my first tattoo. thought yall might like to read it.

i remember the first time we met in a myriad of moments,
a seemingly infinite affair between stained sheets
and my draining deliration,
i was deluded, eyes sewn shut,
roller skating backwards into hell and giving god the finger,
and now as i turn forwards and starve the monkey on my backside,
eight years devoted to dririmancy stops seeming like intimacy
and starts seeming like ignorance.

they say that if you love something, you should let it go,
but what is there to do with an impossible estrangement,
knowing that people will always know how i spent
myself connecting to something meant to sever,
reaping love but refusing to grow it,
realizing that my body is a memorial
and your eloquence will always appear
beautiful to me.

i cannot count the riddles i have written about you,
exhibitions in red ink over clean canvases,
morbid words in a scrabble box, shaken and stirred,
i cannot count the ways i have felt you embrace me,
comatose erupting with life, systole and diastole, ebb and flow,
i lost count years ago, and finally have no desire to reminisce you further,
but still, you are the fix to end all fixes, and in that twisted logic,
you are the reason i am irresolute.

i did love you.

i’ve stopped recognizing the appendages blooming from my body,
though it is not a feeling of dysphoria, but rather ambiguity,
there is no magic in the way you will continue to trick me,
though i will have nothing up my sleeves for you but the desire
to lay on a beach drenched in sunlight and feel something extraordinary.
i have claimed the scars as my own,
the fragile chrysalis in which i have morphed into something winged.

happy anniversary to the last time i felt your kiss on my skin,
and dear god, here’s to never feeling it again.