“I have no idea how I made it this far without you.”

She spoke with so much hope, the future dancing on her lips like a flame.

Her smile is an open flame and I have a paper heart.

It was always you who felt like water when my whole body was a flame.

Just because the pain is comfortable doesn’t mean you have to wear it.

Some days survival is all the living I can do.

There’s a weight to it, this missing you.

Her heart is heavy and ruined with hope.

Maybe I hold onto pain because I don’t know who I am without it.

I cannot lose you quietly. It will take blood and bone to pull you from my chest.

Even heartbreak can find a way to feel like home.

We built futures I’ll never get to visit. But I still have to watch them crumble.

I surround myself with trees in the hope I might become a  growing thing, too.

To hurt is simply an act of remembering. Of holding my skin to the edge in the hope I might feel anything at all.

The answer is you. I forget the question.

You touch me as though you have forgotten my skin.

What a fragile, dying thing love turned out to be.

Failure is not the absence of success. Failure is the neglect of trying.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

Tear me open and I will bleed in your name. My heart aches from your absence, but in the aching and breaking is where my art is born.

Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society.

While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.

In the absence of you I look to the moon and pray that the stars light my way, too.

Absence was always your best side.