poems for you. always for you. ✓

p r o s e

(prose??)

I cradle my head in my hands because it's the closest thing to cradling my heart and telling it to keep beating. I cradle my head in my hands to keep the voices from coming but they're already creeping in through the spaces between my fingers. I cradle my head in my hands, trying to remember who I was when I knew how to love—I do remember, but I don't know how to become her anymore, because the girl I once was didn't know the world and it's knives and the traps they call love. Or the loneliness that drives people to search for love where love does not grow. I cradle my head in my hands, remembering the soft soil I once was and the wild rose I am now and how I wish I am the soil. The ground, the soil, is the place for people to bloom, but now I am a flower who blooms for herself, and I am thorns and scarlet and madness, and the line that separates loving and surviving are blurred so heavily that they become one. I cradle my head in my hands, my mind breaking into two because I'm trying to be the right person for everyone when I only know how to live for myself.