may we meet again (i’m ready to be hurt)
By: Jennifer Bui
and so i stood in dante’s flames; heart on silver, and soul on lead. i drowned in death from faithful vows of the poisonous love i once had sworn with broken locks and mercury scars, veins of tears that paved the future’s paths. now i’m here amidst the vultures, alone with the faults that whip my dripping wounds, yet i can’t help but wonder if things would be different if you had known the truth.
whatever words you deem i’m worthy of, my apologies for misleading you. i’m neither a warrior nor a lover, a wolf nor a lamb; i’m a swan crying its final song with a throat slit open and scared eyes staring oblivion. i’m the blade my maker couldn’t be proud of and is slowly molten down to scrap metal with fiery licks of worthlessness.
i laugh with cries and carbon monoxide, sleep with dreams of cyanide, whisper with broken songs and painful distance. my skin is too sensitive to kindness and acceptance and rejects the care i’ve wanted to ask for. and here i am writing something i don’t like saying, a plea of ending suffering. for i will take whatever judgment you give with the quiet silence of falsehood and sing teardrops in the calm of the dead with foreign tongues for it’s the only solace i can have and the only one i’m allowed.
but i would do anything to be able to laugh without the rivers that rage behind my eyes, to let you close without having to hurt, to see the brilliant stars when nights are too dark. i want my heart back from satan’s three maws and my soul from hydra venom and my life from the puppeteers that coldly entertain gods with marionettes with broken strings. but nothing comes without a price, and i have nothing left to give.
so take my all and don’t look back. for you’ll see me with my left arm outstretched, begging for you to stay as the clock ticks down to 23:59:59.99. and when you finally reach for that hand with your own, please don’t let me disappear with the cherry blossoms that brokenly grace the moonlit roads, like a spring dream that vanishes with the herald of dawn. but if leaving is your desire, then relinquish what happiness we received in meeting and conversing, dismiss the links of memories we once held, and ignore any pain or nostalgia we may be cursed with.
crush the past till nothing remains and may our paths never intersect, but my memory withstands time and always crosses its boundaries in thought. so that must be our fate; one who departs without burden or regrets, and the other who must remember. in the eternal cycle called rebirth, may we meet again in a kinder time where both may recall what bonds were shared. so until then, i will burn in these emotions and writhe in agony at the once beautiful history that bound us. i’m on my knees, ready to be hurt.