spring forward/fall back.

"daylight savings is my saviour, maybe."

there’s something saccharine and self-reflective in the spring air. don’t drink on an empty stomach, don’t roll into your nineteenth year without knowing who you are, knowing how to define your leadership style in three words. job interviews and tenancy agreements and being like. actually almost an adult. the illusion is slowly dissolving. summer will be your wake-up call if you don’t sleep through it. 

it’s seven p.m. on a tuesday. summer is slipping through the cracks of spring and the windows of the library’s fourth floor. 

i’m trying to study, trying to write, trying to discover what Kind Of Girl i am. i miss the buzzfeed quizzes we’d take in the back of maths and i miss being in the back of maths. i miss when one word was enough to define me, when my body was uncarved and untouched. i miss when Pure Heroine was the closest to life i’d ever been, when music was a whole world and i could taste the “cola with the burnt-out taste,” let it make me bitter, let you sweeten me up. 

i remember the taste of blood in my mouth. when i was seven i ripped my lip from the bone. now i’m thirty stitches and two surgeries older. still just as scared, just as dizzy. the last time i tasted blood was when they told me about the car accident/the glass glittering across the road and your back nearly broken. lucky to be alive, they said, and i was seven again, bitter again, waiting for a sweetness that never came. mama calls it empathy. that’s one word. it’s not enough anymore.

it’s seven eighteen on a tuesday. summer is cooling as fast as it warmed my blood, and the lights are dim. i’m too young to be here but too old to sleep in mama’s bed, curled in the hollow created by her body. 

grief is a cold lover, bitter, bitter, bitter. i offer it my sweetness, offer it everything i have. look at the stars, i tell my grief. people find solace there. why not me? why can’t i see his eyes looking down at me? grief tells me that i have forgotten. they are blue, i promise, they were blue, 

but i know it is not the colour i have forgotten. grief calls me calloused. that’s two words. i know i am more than this.

my fingertips pressed to the neck of my guitar. leaving her the same way i wish grief would. hardened skin. the flesh beneath is soft, the heart it envelops is full of promise. it beats. it breathes. it finds the tune. stubborn, i hope. strong, if i’m lucky. 

i learned love in the gaps in the stave and in the upper branches of trees. unseen. i spoke my love into existence with my lips pressed to her ear, hoping nobody else would hear. i grew up in fear of stained glass windows and nails. here, the sky is open. the heavens beam down on me. religion is a community. it is not taught. it is embraced. i am not spoiled. i am embraced. my heart is full of promise. it breathes, it beats. it has found sweetness, left behind the bitterness. the world belongs to me. i am patient. i am honest.

back to my roots, ‘your inner pancake flavour says a lot about you.’ quadratics and desmos. solving the stupid 9x-7i>3(3x7u) equation on valentines day in class. blushing when you slid your answer across the desk. maybe it means something. maybe we could be something. choc chip, apparently… hopeful, optimistic. sweet. balancing out the learned bitterness. biting my cheek. biding my time. i always knew i’d be here one day. 

nearly eight. the sky’s still light. daylight savings is my saviour, maybe. i’ll take photos of the rhododendrons in the twilight on my way home. a romantic, i guess. it’s not as open as choc chip pancakes. maybe i’ll become more than a necklace of words one day. maybe i’ll unlearn this bitterness and the taste of blood in my mouth. time loosens the grip i have on Pure Heroine. my lip is healed. the scars remain. summer will be here properly soon. it’s time to lie in the grass and forget about the past. lie in the sand and let grief slowly melt from my bones. become a little more every day. 

wherever you are, i hope you’re okay.