Attempts

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There were no boundaries left when it came down to her. All the layers were just clothes and more clothes and raw skin and bare bones and then there was her.

Fragile, so small, and yet so strong and so her. She was quiet, and he thought that as long as her image stayed in his heart he could keep her safe, but he was wrong.

No matter how delicate she was, she was beautiful. More beautiful than he thought he realized. It was a type of beauty he couldn't keep to himself, a type of beauty everyone noticed but her.

And he never realized he could feel fear until then. Never did he realize before that he would be afraid that he'd lose her. Never did he realize before that he couldn't keep her to himself.

So he attempted to stay away. He attempted to remove himself from her presence. He attempted to pretend he didn't exist. He attempted to pretend he didn't care.

But there is only so much you can pretend you don't feel.

There is only so much he can attempt to do. If what he feels is different from what he is trying to say; from what he is trying to show. There is only so much he can attempt to hide.

It took him several attempts to tell her the truth--his truth; his version, if that even mattered. Three words, probably the most cliche group of words in the history of forever. All his attempts to pull away, to remove himself from her life. All his reasons--the one reason, really--why he attempted to not feel the feelings he was showing her, telling her now.

She attempted to talk over him but he wouldn't let her talk until he felt he was over. Then he sat there, spent from pouring out everything in his heart to this one girl. 

The one girl that he felt would care. The one girl that really mattered.

Then there was silence. The uncomfortable kind (for him anyway). He was about to fill the silence by talking about the weather or something else neutral. Then she leaned forward.

She had attempted to kiss him on the lips but she got his nose. There were three seconds of embarrassed warm laughter.

Some attempts, when failed, are meant to be tried again.

That Time You Made Me Rhyme (and it was bad)

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You are a dust cloud blowing across my empty mind. The reason why I try to make my poems rhyme. The way I try to look nice, or cook fancy stuff even though I don't know a thing about thyme. And oh by the way, this poem kinda sucks, like the fact that at the park we can't feed the ducks.

But it was you. You, with your warm sunshine smiles and scalding hot chocolate mugs, feverish eyes bright when our lips meet and we introduce ourselves to each other repeatedly, through corny songs (but not as corny as this poem-rant) and that way you smile with the corner of your lips, or shouting at each other as we beat the high scores we set at Halo. The way your hair fans out when you lie down on a blanket in that park where we can't feed the ducks, using my stomach or my thigh as your pillow while you lose yourself in those books you love so much.

You are a firecracker, a burst of light against an expanse of black, black sky. I don't know why, but when I'm with you I just can't help but sigh.

Sigh, because I'm happy. Sigh, because I'm sad. Sigh, because I'm scared.

Sigh, because I don't know how long this will last.

The spine of your book pokes me out of my thoughts. You were sitting up, a patch of sunlight on your book and your exposed thigh (those shorts were a really good idea) as you grinned at me, and I felt warm inside out.

"Still with me?" you ask with a grin. I nod.

"Yeah."

I will be as long as you let me, I add in my head, as I lay back down and opened my own book. The bright sky was the perfect backdrop to the next words that I read.

You have something... no, someone important. You're a lucky oaf.

Frameworks of Decay

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A cloud of ravens swarmed around the roof, surrounding the abandoned house with a faint halo of dark feathers and the stench of death, of time slowly eating it up from its foundations. It was beauty left to rot. Slowly, desperately, it looks at you from across the field, silently pleading with broken window-frame eyes and gaping door-off-hinges mouths.

Am I not good enough, it seems to ask, gazing at us sadly.

We once lived there, in that house.

Those were happy times.

Now, the floors where we learned to take our first steps are giving under our feet. The places where we used to run around in, the space were we threw our first party and the spot where we first threw up from drinking too much in said party... they were barely recognizable. The stairs are missing whole steps, now not taking us anywhere but the past. Rooms that were the beginnings of our worlds, and the attic where we kept our old stuff... now, the whole house has become the attic, left behind under a dust cloth and never opened once again.

Until now.

We had stopped exploring the old house, stood in front of it and allowing its shadow to loom over us. You ran your hands over the prickly bushes and sorry stumps of what was once a beautifully tended flower garden, now reduced to weeds and creeping vines of more weeds. The ravens were coming back in small flocks, and they squawked over the two us irritably. It was annoying how they made us feel as if we were trespassing over a place that was rightfully ours.

But now, what was once our home was less than a mere skeleton of a house. The warmth, the memories, everything seemed to have fled the place. Like the owners, the occupants. Us.

You had unconsciously dug a little hole in the ground with the toe of your sneaker. I stared at it, and with a finality I dropped the little piece of metal I had held in my hand. 

We both stared at the key for a moment before you kicked the dirt back into the hole, stamping your foot firmly to flatten the gap you had made in the ground. 

Bye house, we whispered in our heads, and turned our backs for the final time. The ravens called out their goodbyes. One swooped down and began pecking at the ground where the key was buried.

The sun was setting, and the shadow of the house stretched, following our steps until it faded into the surrounding darkness. The sun was gone, and so was the warmth. 

We wrap our arms around each other's shoulders as the house looked on sadly.