desperate and yearning

they always warned you about talking to strangers,

but they never told you about falling in love with the way

your strange, quiet neighbor reads on his rooftop

or how tears will pour from your eyes when youre watching

a love movie, desperate and yearning for it to

overtake you, or how one day you might want to

bring a blade to your wrists because you feel 

too much (or too little) They never told you

how it’ll feel when his fingertips are swimming

below your waistband or how to break up with someone

you once wanted to get married to.

We know not to take rides from strangers and all, 

not how to let a stranger bring your heart on a trip. 

     

"Summer is ending," the ruby leaves whispered to me, as I stepped outside into the un-expectant chill of the early morning. Last year, summer was filled with heated kisses, heated arguments and too many doctor visits. I drowned in it, really. And when it ended, I feared what that meant for me. What it meant for someone who was too sick to go to college like the rest of her friends, what it meant for someone who was surviving on deprivation alone. Alone, is what I really was. And now this summer is coming to a close. But it was entirely different than the last. Singing in spinning chairs at five am, with sweet boys creating mixed drinks with band shirts on and strangers whispering in dark corners, trying to get close. Late trips to burger king for fatty foods and not caring about its content, bodies moving fiercely on bare mattresses one after the other and kisses on foreheads as eyes fluttered shut. It was peaceful. It was the break I needed before the fall. And now Autumn has peered its head through my window, waking me up. Bringing me back to reality. Shaking me from my willowy dreamland. 

School begins in September. I have about two weeks to gather the notion of sleeping in my own bed, with no mommy or boyfriend or brother and sister to call on in the night if those terrors crept up again. I'll be in a dorm, in the almost-real-world for young adults. By myself with a too clean roommate and a bathroom all to myself and empty hangers that need cashmere hugs. I am awfully afraid but so ready to dip my toes in.