I Am Here

And when it was all said and done, you were gone.

And I was here.

And we were both looking at each other like we were stupid. To want to breathe is to want to be loved. To hope the air is kind enough to kiss your lungs. To pray the earth feels like holding you up today, to want to be alive is to ask the world to not reject your very being.

So when it does, and it eventually will feel like it, what am I then, love?

 If not a capsule for the ungiven affection afflicted upon me, what do you do? When a love you cannot remember is having a sleepover, covered by the dirt and the leaves? What purpose does this pain have? A warrant to search the crevices of my spine and make a home there. Creasing my bones,

bending what I have left in me into a party trick balloon animal to amuse the masses with my vocabulary. What right does it have to my throat, closing off roads for construction of a wall? With what feet do I walk on when the sole purpose was to somehow get back to you? To tell a lie is to blaspheme my love, so I will not:

 I am angry.

 I am angry that it took you, that it grabbed you by the throat and shook the core of your soul from this plane. I am angry that you left with it, gently took the violent hand that guided you a forever away and I am angry that I too am not allowed to go.

What then, am I to do with this corpse of a body when the love it was meant to hold has whispered its last breath?

 I will tell you.

You find a tree, and you sit. And you stare at the dirt and you stare at the trees and you rot. You breathe in the well wishes of the butterflies, and exhale the dry funeral colors. You soak up the sun and thank the seeds for their song. You allow the Earth to kiss your toes and cool your fever.

And when you breathe in again,

this time the love will be yours.

This time the love will be relentlessly selfish, like the last leaf of fall clinging to life. Like leaving your family to finally grow, like claiming the final slice of pizza because you are hungry and

what is meant for you will be willing to wait.

And when you exhale the flesh will fall from your naked bones. And it will splatter on the ground and it will not be pretty.

Because healing looks disgusting and dirty and painful.

It is caring enough to rip the old that still clings to your ribcage and throw it out.

 My Love, when you leave and this half-dead body fails to love me back, I promise I will slip it off and build me a new one, and I will set the kind pieces of you in my front pocket for safekeeping. Because I am still here.

And when it is all said and done, you were gone.

Image by: Nastasya Shuljak
Instagram: @stoways_toys

Victoria Rollins

Victoria Rollins is a 10th-grade high school student. She is a Kansas City-based writer. She enjoys painting, participating in community activities, and writing poetry. She plans to pursue a career in race studies with an emphasis on psychology.