“You were an ocean and I never did learn to breathe underwater.”

I knew I loved you before I understood what that meant.

All I really know is whatever the cost you’re worth it.

I spent a lifetime building shrine to things that can’t love me back. (music, poetry, you)

My body has always been a stranger. And it aches in a language I don’t understand.

And again I wake up hoping today is the day I don’t miss you.

I don’t know how else to say it. I will love you for the rest of my life.

Of all the people I’ve been the man you loved is the only one I miss.

Maybe letting go isn’t all that different to loving you.

I swear my bones can feel it whenever you speak my name.

What a gentle curse: to still want you after all we’ve been.

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.

She breathed love like air. She was Paris turned human.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Breathe in the pain and bring out the wounds. It’s only a process and you’ll learn to survive the rest.

Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest birds.

I drink to feel I smoke to breathe Just look what love has done to me.

There’s not much I know about forgetting. By which I mean I can hear her name from a distance; and it still breathes cold in my chest.

Wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

I held my breath underwater and felt surrender in my lungs; maybe this too counts as love.