The Girl

the girl i thought i loved told me you are supposed to hold your breath when you go by a cemetery,

each day i drove her to work, and on my way back home i passed a cemetery and held my breath, the girl i thought i loved thought a lot about the dead,

she had roses growing in her ribcage and when she felt pain they tangled into her veins,

she became so angry by the sticking of the thorns that she couldn’t contain herself.

the girl i thought i loved told me that cutting yourself is a cry for attention,

later on when she was cutting herself i knew exactly what she meant,

i told her i was leaving and she stood in the street, my headlights illuminating her silhouette, the girl i thought i loved taught me a lot about the difference between loving and caring for a

person,

when her tears streaked pillows and i hid her razors in my glove box i learned that sometimes you can’t give people what they want, but only what they need.

the girl i thought i loved probably loved me, but when you grow up a rose in a patch of tulips you don’t know what is right and what is wrong,

so when my head slammed into the wall and the thorns stuck into your ribcage you didn’t notice anymore,

there is a lot to learn from a rose, but some people just prefer orchids.

the girl i love has never told me to hold my breath when i go by a cemetery,

and it works out well, because when i met her i took a different way back to town and didn’t drive by it,

and over months of adaption and discipline i started breathing again when i happened to drive past one,

you see, the girl i love doesn’t think a lot about the dead,

she thinks a lot about the colors in the trees and the flowers and the sky,

she doesn’t always know what to say but when she says it, it hits home.

the girl i love has orchids growing inside of her,

they fill her airways and her arms, their soft petals grow from her fingertips,

orchids need a lot of love, they require care every day,

if you leave an orchid alone for too long it will wither.

the girl i love lives in the sunlight, even though her room has no windows,

it is a room we share now, and while she blooms the soft purples and whites of delicate pigments

i stay in the shadows,

i love to see how she grows.

the girl i love is gentle, when the flowers growing in her lungs become too much to hold she spits them out,

i try to keep them and root them inside of me, where they can grow. sometimes they die and i do not know why, other times they blossom. the girl i love has orchids growing inside of her,

and suddenly roses aren’t so appealing to me.