Sad Happiness

 I’m happy to be able to be sad. Emotions are my foundation. I felt so much pain that it felt like living in pain meant being alive. I remember my body bleeding years and trembling with emotions. Every month. Every day. I’d bleed and I’d cry and it felt like being alive. I’d feel a song in my sternum and I’d open my eyes to see endings. It was how I lived. How I survived. How I created and how I prepared to die. 

Every day was a sad song and emotions had this stranglehold on my oblivion. It felt encompassing, high. It felt like my soul was preparing to be buried every day and I would shovel myself deeper preparing for death. A blissful death. A happy death. An emotional grave and I fucking loved it, I felt it. I felt my bones. I let it hold me. And then I realized I was twenty-two and I’d buried myself in a grave with all these years left to live. It was so confusing, I felt so much and somehow was meant to go on living. The love and pain was brutal. And I didn’t know how to breathe from my grave. If I wasn’t going to die, I needed to stop living. 

I turned off.

I switched my power off. Power. The way I’m able to encompass myself in emotions is a power that many people beg to feel. Shay. In a way he saved me by being the reason I had to turn off. He was in my veins. When I close my eyes, my body hums with him. The windy car rides, the music, the smiles, the existence. Our touches and laughter. I remember seeing life for the first time with him and simultaneously wanting to gauge out my eye sockets without him around. I couldn’t imagine seeing without him. I didn’t realize I could live with him inside of my skeleton. I didn’t know it was possible to breathe him inside me and get to keep him.

I thought love had to mean sadness and I couldn’t imagine living without him. I thought I had to. I had to prepare the grief that living with him would entail. I had to feel pain to feel love and I loved him so much, so selfishly I couldn’t lose him. I couldn’t give him up. So I turned myself off. Turned off the love, dulled it. Dulled myself to drink him in for eternity rather than a moment.

I thought I was meant to remember him and never considered I was meant to become a part of him. I thought love was meant to be a past. Passing love. Memories. Art. Pain. 

A future was turned off. I was twenty two and didn’t think I’d be twenty seven and still get to see him with my eye sockets. I stopped looking. I stopped seeing. I felt him around me and allowed his time to consume me.

And when my stubborn love wanted more I had to drown it down. And I took pills to turn off. Because there was more than him that I didn’t understand. How was he supposed to stay when no one else did? 

But he did. Six years. Six years of waking up to his hum. While my body tore my skeleton apart and broke every bone of memories and pain, he carved himself inside me. I feel him. I felt him.

I’ve been listening to sad songs. And laughing. I’ve been looking at shay and experiencing him. Envisioning adventures and feeling love. Our love is enveloping. It hasn’t faded an inch. It’s on a threshold that has more and without my medication my body is craving to feel him. To be with him. To show him a touch of how much I could.

We don’t have to be a story that ends. My mothers love can become my love to be a mother. I want his bones to make a mini pocket version that I can keep and love and encompass. I prepared to lose someone I love. That’s what you don’t understand when you’re young. You don’t have to stop loving anything. Or anyone. You. You don’t have to fucking do anything. The only thing you have to do one day is die. But you don’t have to die when you’re living. 

It’s terrifying being open and vulnerable and available and present. But it’s the most beautiful power I have. And it makes me beautiful. I’m beautiful. Not my flesh and bones and body.

My soul is so beautiful. My heart. My love. My art. 

I used to think Shay made me worthy and beautiful. He just allowed me to see how beautiful I am. I’ve been this beautiful my entire life. This loving. This adoring. Poetic power. He’s in my veins and my soul and I’m in his.

And if there were a day where he did become a memory, my beauty wouldn’t fade. It would only grow. 

I’m growing up. I’m loving myself. My soul. I feel everything and never want to feel nothing again. 

I’m so strong. I can feel it all. Everything.