DEAR 1-6

Dear 1,
You were a trial. You were my virgin hands seeking out something to taint them with, the sin I wanted to use to rebel against my parents at the age of fourteen. You were the first boy to kiss me, and it wasn’t with my consent. I spent the next three days thinking, “no, this is not how I planned it out, this is not the path I set myself on” but you had a pair of ears that only heard what they wanted to hear. I turned my skin into a cocoon and hid behind myself, inside of doorways and ducked into bathrooms each time I saw you walking down the hall at school because when I had to face, you the feeling of your lips on mine would trail over my body like a ghost�"chill included�"and I’d freeze. My veins filled with glacial ice and I don’t think you ever noticed because you were too busy trying to slide your hand up my dress; your palms left burn scars along my thighs and to this day I’m still trying to forget their sting.

Dear 2,
You were the three-year long aftermath of my first relationship; you tried to clean up the mess he created out of me and constructed your own. I gave you a home in my chest, a place for you to rest your head and listen to the beat of my heart as a song because you were the one who was keeping it going. But when the bruises started showing up between my ribs and hips the thought “this isn’t how love is supposed to be shown” surfaced in my brain. For too long my tired eyes saw you as a star, when in reality, you were a violent sinkhole of dark matter, starved for someone to adore you but not knowing how to treat the souls who did.

Dear 3,
I’m sorry you bought that train ticket to come see me but I’m not wearing cat ears for you anymore.

Dear 4,
You were the first girl I poured myself in to and the last to date. You were the subject of my poetry for nearly a year before you discovered that your own sadness felt warmer than the embrace I could only imagine giving you from 800 miles away. The night you tried to drown yourself in the bathtub, it felt more like I was the one who was submerged. I let my fingertips trace the pattern of your phone number across my owns screen and when you answered stifling sobs I told you I loved you. And in a whimper you said it back but, now that I think of it, it seemed more likely you couldn’t think clearly with your bones shaking, brain wounded, and water still settling in the gullies of your lungs. I may have never known what it felt like to actually touch you but god, did you know how to leave a lasting mark on me when you left.

Dear 5,
I was always too much for you to handle. With you, I was a bear, and you were the scared cub hiding between my legs when life threw a punch at you that wouldn’t have even hurt a fly. Five, you were what it took for me to realize the strength I had brewing inside of me and I was finally able to save myself rather than wait for another person to do it. I wish you had realized that just because you loved me didn’t mean I loved you back. I was a captive in your bed for over six months before I deemed that your tongue no longer deserved to grace my body, nor did your heart deserve to seek shelter in my chest. I always told you that I was mass grave for every soul that fell for me, and you were no exception to the bloodshed.

Dear 6,
You are the nights I wish I hadn’t harmed myself so I could have been pristine, the representation of what it meant to be pure the first night you undressed me. You are the weight lifted from my shoulders, you are a wolf scaring off my past like a frightened sheep, you are a storm that floods and I’m not afraid to drown in the tide you bring. You and I are not the empty beer bottles on the counter, but the fire in our stomachs from drinking down their contents as if we needed something else to fuel the wildfire already inside of us. I am claw marks on your desperate back and you are each bite left on my shoulder, and we, we are the shifted sheets on a bed that has come know the rhythm of our bodies as a melody. And if I’m going to be honest, I can’t recall the last time I was this happy, the last I was seen as more than what my sadness told me I was. And right now, I’d like to stop counting, I’d like to stay at six, because six is my favorite number and I’d rather dwell in a beautiful hell than be forced into a heaven I don’t see as such.