Prose
When a Simple Question is Actually an Interrogation
“How do you feel now?” ONLY in the HUSH of loitering phrasing do I search for meaning when a pang hits my heart, jolting my spine. I eased away and erased my musing at the moment it all changed. ~I was rummaging through the wind to pave my way home, and in the liminal space where there was you and me, it was rife with sleuthing: this was why I lied. Caitlin x
By Caitlin Charlton5 months ago in Poets
Mature for My Age
I was seventeen and already speaking like I had taxes to file, already sitting with my legs crossed like an apology, already thanking waiters too carefully, already rehearsing adulthood like maybe if I did it convincingly enough someone would finally keep me. Then you arrived with your cigarette voice and your hands always smelling like rain-soaked denim and liquor, looking at me like you’d discovered something hidden under floorboards. You said I was different. Not pretty first— different. Which felt worse somehow. More permanent. You said girls your age are exhausting, but you— you could hold a conversation, you understood nuance, you had old eyes. Old eyes. I carried that phrase around like a stolen ID. I let it buy me entry into places I had no business being. You loved me most when I acted least like myself. When I stayed calm while you disappeared for hours. When I laughed at jokes that felt like bruises. When I folded myself smaller and smaller so your ego could stretch its legs. You called me mature in the same breath you blamed everything on my age. After fights, you’d rake your hand through your hair like a tired father and tell me, “You’re just too young to understand relationships like this.” Like this. As if love was supposed to feel like standing barefoot on broken glass trying not to bleed loud enough to make you leave. You made cruelty sound educational. Every time you hurt me there was suddenly a lesson attached to it. I was needy. I was sensitive. I took things too personally. Meanwhile you could disappear for two days and come back smelling like another woman’s shampoo and somehow I was the unstable one for noticing. I became excellent at doubting myself. You’d flirt with waitresses right in front of me, then kiss my temple afterward like I should feel lucky to be chosen at all. And God, I did. That’s the humiliating part. I loved you like a dog left out in the rain still wagging its tail when the door finally opens. Even after you left me crying in parking lots. Even after you went cold in bed beside me, your body there but your attention already elsewhere. Even after I started memorizing the silence between your texts better than my own reflection. The night you ended things, you spoke so gently I almost mistook it for kindness. You said this wasn’t healthy anymore. Said I deserved someone closer to my stage of life. And I remember thinking: Funny. My age only seemed tragic once you were done using it. You left me with all this wreckage then walked away acting morally exhausted, like surviving you had somehow taken something out of you. But the part that still wakes me up sometimes is how you kept your location on. Like I wasn’t even worth hiding from. I watched that little blue dot drift through the city night after night. The bar on Main. The whiskey place with the red lights. The ugly rooftop downtown where girls in leather jackets lean over sticky counters hoping destruction picks them special too. I would stare at my phone in the dark imagining your hand on someone else’s back, your mouth at another girl’s ear feeding her the same lines you fed me. You’re different. You’re smarter than girls your age. I forget how young you are. I wonder if she believed you immediately or if you had to work for it. I wonder if she cried in the bathroom eventually too. Years later, I still catch myself apologizing too quickly. Still feel panic rise in my throat when someone’s tone changes slightly. Still confuse being wanted with being consumed. But I know this now: You did not love me because I was mature. You loved me because I was young enough to mistake being destroyed for being chosen.
By Brie Boleyn5 months ago in Poets
The gratitude of monotony
There is a kind of quiet that arrives not as absence, but as repetition. It lives in the turning of a kettle that has been turned a thousand times before, in the folding of laundry that will be unfolded and folded again, in the same light falling across the same floor at nearly the same hour each day. At first, the mind mistakes it for nothingness. It calls it small. It calls it unimportant. It looks for escape in novelty, in interruption, in anything that breaks the soft sameness. But the longer one stays with it, the more it begins to speak. The monotony of life is not empty. It is steady. It is a kind of breathing you only notice when you stop trying to outrun it. There is gratitude hidden in it, not loud or triumphant, but patient as stone warmed by sun. The body learns the map of its own days: wake, wash, work, rest. Love returns not as spectacle but as habit—offered in meals prepared without announcement, in doors held open, in the remembering of small needs before they are spoken. Even sorrow, when it comes, finds itself held by routine. It does not vanish, but it is carried. The same hands that stir soup also learn how to endure. And somewhere in that repetition, a strange mercy forms. Not everything must be new to be meaningful. Not everything must surprise to be sacred. The day that looks like yesterday is not lesser for it; it is proof that life continues to insist on itself, quietly, faithfully, without applause. Gratitude does not always arrive like a revelation. Sometimes it arrives like brushing your teeth again, like washing the same cup, like noticing that you are still here, still living inside the ordinary glow of another unchanged morning and finding, unexpectedly, that this is enough.
By Taylor Ward5 months ago in Poets
The Small, Hard Thing
There are three photographs of me from that winter. In one, I am laughing with my mouth open too wide, like the girl in the picture doesn’t know what waits for her in July. In another, your hand is at the base of my spine, casual as weather. The third was taken after. Though no one looking at it would know that. Everyone always says that: "You look so happy here." I threw away the blue dress before I learned how to forgive myself for buying it. That came years later, in the produce aisle, holding peaches too soft to survive the drive home. Funny— I remembered your birthday for seven consecutive years and forgot my own phone number twice. The worst part wasn’t the leaving. No. It was how long I continued introducing you in stories after you were gone. Like muscle memory. Like a country still printing maps with a vanished city. In May, before any damage had technically occurred, my mother asked me over for coffee and whether I trusted you.
By Brie Boleyn5 months ago in Poets
