Etch in your heart, like you etched the name on a wall for everyone to see

they write on your heart, you think.

those lovely people (all stages, puppy-love, dreamy goo-goo eyes, painful tears and angry background looks love, happy pretend everything’s fine love, perfect story-book fantasy I’m going to go out with my friends, don’t wait up)

They wrote down a secret message. Like some wild adventure story where you can send them secrets through a mysterious passageway. Maybe it washes away once the revelatory waters hit too hard? Maybe it will help take the pain away even just a tiny bit for one moment?

it wasn’t a digging, a penciling in, it was not a sharp knife or pen with dark ink. before you could ask about the barely recognizable feelings the whisper echoed back, you didn’t realize it, you never felt it enough to let it in fully(did your childhood scar you. Did you hide from your healing?)

You thought it was like those names you’d read on the walls at school, under the slide at your favorite park.

Scrawled out in permanent marker, next to those names is a lovely, “fuck you,”

That one easy to recognize statement where no matter where you go, you’ll always find yourself wondering if there’s one place that won’t have a big “fuck you,” so happily, proudly, angrily

Pronounced. yes I was referring to

Holden Caulfield, don’t you think I’m a bit pretentious for even talking about it?

That’s what I’m talking about, actually.

It’s etched somewhere else, I think, and you feel it too, don’t you?

You feel it was never written on your sleeve, your arm, your body, or your heart.

It’s in your very tight, enclosed, heated beating form, full of green, angry, full, ripe and painted blood, thick and drowning in your throat

As you try to speak with confidence when you know you have none. you write it down just as deeply as they do, but you didn’t know it until after you exhaled.

You see the naked sun beating down on all the coupled names, your name isn’t there.

But you know somewhere, something real tells you someone important wrote it down anyway, (it feels like they wrote it down in over the top cursive.)

And it feels like a faraway dream, a funny, amazing, tantalizing story that you need to be a part of.

You are just hoping that the big

“Fuck you,”

Isn’t there

In the end.

These stories I made up in my mind

Give me comfort,

Don’t they comfort you, too?