Mom, it hurts (sampled from We Found Love, Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris)

Mom, 

If he were still here, I, I

I would like to introduce you two.

I would invite him over for Sunday tea and you’d be the first person I want him to meet. I only want good people 

to meet you, and I thought hard about it, I thought

long about it, and I wrote about it in my journal, made covers of my favorite breakup songs, 

but I know he was a good 

person. He would have been good to you. I promise that you would have really liked him, Mom. 

I am confident, and I would have introduced you two.

Mom, 

Sometimes, I wonder about the pattern of your heartbeat when you fell in love as a teenager for the first time. Have you ever had the feeling that you 

can’t ever do anything right? Have you ever tried falling asleep with not a broken heart, but a hopeful one? 

That’s how I’m feeling right now. Nothing really makes sense, and I can feel myself slipping in and out of fantasy on the streets as I walk home from class. Fantasy feels like swimming in a pool of oil so thick and so sweet that for just a second, my tongue thinks it’s honey and I pretend that I’m skinny dipping in gasoline. I think that I’m in love again. I’m in love again. I’m on fire. I can’t tell if I’m burning or drowning. Okay, I’ll stop now. I am ready to come back down, but I don’t know how to.

Mom, can you come and save me? I think I might need help. I was always embarrassed of rejection, but I wouldn’t ask for help even if it cost me my all. I’m going to call you, but I want you to decline my call. I want you to defer me to voicemail, because rejection gets my mind off of whatever is hurting me most. I would rather feel something than absolutely nothing at all. 

Mom, 

I’m really good at finding love in hopeless places. I’m really, really good at it, and I’ve gotten even better over the years. These eyes of mine can see color in the tiniest black cracks, and I pull them out like white bed sheets until they cover the entire room. Cover, cover, cover. I only care about color. I only care about color. I only care about color, and I’m in love with color. Color, color, color. I only care about myself. I want to dip my brush in the sea and paint the whole sky the way I’ve always imagined it to be. Be, be, be. Red stars, green houses, purple dragons and everyone I see standing around a white picket fence with my favorite farm animals. Animals, animals, animals.

Mom,
You're right. I am terrified of being alone. There is something

wrong with me, and I don’t know why I’m so terrified of being

alone. I don’t know why I have to have a person hold my hand every moment

of every day, and I replace my feelings like they’re nothing. Sold them away. 

But they cost me everything. Love is not nothing. It’s never nothing, but no one else 

understands. I don’t understand. 

I was never comfortable with looking back, and tonight, I want to look back, 

but I don’t usually look back, and I want to look back,

and I want to look back, but I never looked 

back. I knew that I would fall in love with him if I wrote about him,

but I wrote it out anyway. Visited the past, screamed my red-hot anger out into the Nephilim’s esophagus and threw away my dignity like it’s a rotting orange peel. I do not ever want to fall in this type of 

love again. Love isn’t supposed to smell like rotting orange peels, but that’s exactly what I smell like right now. 

Mom,

It really hurts, and I don't know how to move on. 

Move on. I don’t know how to move on. Move on.

Move on. I don’t know how to move on. Move on.

Move on. But we’ll always have each other, right? My Mom and I. You’re the only person I have left.

You’ll be here for me, and I’ll be here for you, and 

Everything will be okay, because we are best friends. Everything will be okay,

Just like the way we had always imagined

everything. I want to go back to the old times, when you would read me fables from your book, and I hope you won’t be mad if tonight, I looked back at a hopeless place.