l-w-meyer

[l-w-meyer]

Guilt is heavy on my lips-

The things they've said, the things they've done.

Haunted by actions I cannot, will not take back

Actions that captured his heart and soul even though I never asked for it, never wanted it

never wanted him

Haunted by promises, gilded like gold but rotting inside

hollow, empty, broken

Promises I shouldn't keep, wouldn't keep

couldn't keep

promises he broke as much as I did.

Consequences are heavy on my tongue-

The weight of my words as I worry and wonder

will they break you? will they heal you?

I hold your soul in my palm and it burns me

you burn me

as much as I burn you

We set ourselves on fire to keep the other warm,

but the ash that's left in the end heals no wounds.

Fear is heavy in my hands-

My fingers are stiff, numb, immobile

I try to clasp you hand but I can't feel you

can't feel anything

The more I try to grasp the more everything slips

The more you fall,

and I fall with you.

[l-w-meyer]

And sometimes it’s like.

If you’d told me 4 years ago where we’d be now, that I’d be watching you dance with someone who looks at me with all the love you never did-

If you told me I’d be so happy that I felt like I could burst-

If you told me that I would get past the pain and would find so much joy-

I don’t think I would have believed you.

But I’m so glad that I’m here now.

[l-w-meyer]

Idolatry

We’re good for each other, we each play our role

I needed a project, you needed control

You saw my pain and I saw your soul

Broken hearts mirror a crooked whole

Build me a temple of your needs and an alter of your fears

Offer sacrifice of love and words so sincere

Feels so good to be gilded, after being disdained

Whatever the cost, I’m happy to pay

Told me I was perfect and I disagreed

But deep down inside you convinced even me

I loved the worship, craved the deceit

It’s the perfect cure for low self esteem

Build me a temple of your needs and an alter of your fears

Offer sacrifice of love and words so sincere

We pretend that it’s healthy and no one’s to blame

Lying’s easy with two in the game

You set me on a dais, that much is clear

I’ve risen so high you’re no longer near

I realized too late it’s so cold up here

You made me your god, now I can’t disappear

Build me a temple of your needs and an alter of your fears

Offer sacrifice of love and words so sincere

I shouldn’t have agreed, you shouldn’t have asked

Maybe it’s just better that it’s all in the past

We’re bad for each other, when all’s said and done

I need to be grounded, you need to be loved

I never saw you and you never saw me

Mirrors lie when you tell them what you want to see

[l-w-meyer]

I am a caterpillar who has spun a cocoon and emerged a butterfly.  Now I get to decide where I want to fly.

[l-w-meyer]

How to fall in love again

Step 1:

Stay up until 7am arguing with your ex while a boy you’ve never met before listens.

Step 2: 

Find out he wrote an album. Listen to it.  

Step 3:

Ignore your feelings. You’re not going through this again.

Step 4:

Acknowledge your feelings.  They aren’t going anywhere.

Step 5:

Skip step 5

[l-w-meyer]

I used to be selfless enough to make sure that my love didn’t hurt you.

But these days, I can’t afford to be choosy about the love I’m freely given. 

[l-w-meyer]

trying to take care of the world because i just want someone to take care of me

[l-w-meyer]

Maybe love is the drug that we need to get through this life

Because even if it’s unrequited

Hope still feels pretty damn good

[l-w-meyer]

Every once in a while, I think about the movie Weathering With You.  

I watched it in a practically empty theater in Nowhere, Wisconsin, because the boy I was dating at the time wanted to.  I watched the film while being as physically close to being in his lap as you can be with a theater armrest and the weight of the world’s catholic guilt between the two of you.  

Hina is a sunshine girl.  While she lives, Tokyo will suffer continuous flooding rains that she has the power to temporarily stop.  The more she stops the rain, the more she turns to water, and once she completely fades the rain will stop for good - she will be the human sacrifice needed to hold the weather at bay. Hodaka, who is in love with her, cannot accept this.  When she vanishes, he brings her back from her prison in the sky.  

Three years later, Tokyo is nearly underwater, but they are together. Millions of people are forced out of their homes and their lives, but Hina and Hodaka are together, and nothing else matters.  

I think about how that’s what being in love is, honestly.  It’s the feeling of wanting someone so badly that you have to be with them, damn the consequences.  Even if it will cost everyone else everything, you just can’t live without them.  It’s intoxicating, a delirious high like no other, because it convinces you that it’s right.  That it’s pure.  That it’s not a lie just like every other damn drug in the universe.  

I think about how you have to be wary of that feeling.  Because you shouldn’t follow it, not to its fullest extent.  Wanting something, feeling something doesn’t make it okay to damn the world for your own happiness. 

And I wonder what I would have done.  That boy I was with, if I had to choose between him or the world, what would I have chosen? Who would I have become?

I think about the drive home from the movie, where he told me that if I was a sunshine girl, he would let me go.  And I guess he did. 

[l-w-meyer]

Last year, I wrote some really optimistic new years’ resolutions.  I couldn’t recall the exact details without looking at them, but they were bold claims about changing the world for the better and sweeping generalizations for “becoming the person I wanted to be”. 

The person who wrote those is a stranger to me now.  She was so, so in love with someone who wasn’t ready to be loved or to love back. She had a set idea for what her life was going to be like for the next year and a half.  She was filled with optimism for the start of a new decade, and though she was terrified for what the future brought, she was excited too.

I’m not that girl any more.  

This year has been….hard.  This year has been harder than I could have ever imagined possible.  I had my heart broken in a way that took so much longer to heal than I ever could have imagined.  I’ve intimately watched friends struggle with mental health issues and losses that run deeper than anything I ever knew was possible.  I stood on the sidelines as two of my friends destroyed each other with a relationship that was doomed to fail from the start, and held their hands as they cursed each other and swore the other had never loved them.  I’ve watched those I love falter and fall under the strain of covid-19, and I know that some of them will never be able to recover completely from those falls.  I have screamed and wept and mourned and cursed God over the hurt and the pain and the losses I have seen and experienced.  I’ve told friends no as they asked for more support than I could give them, and numbed myself to their cries of pain as they struggled through the darkness alone.  

This year has been so, so dark.   There have been days where I struggled to get out of bed because I couldn't see any good reason to.  There have been days where I legitimately looked at the world around me and wondered if there was anything in humanity that made us worth giving a damn about.  When I wondered what the point of it all was, and legitimately considered the idea that the universe would be a better place if an asteroid hit the earth and took us all out in a single blow.  

But there have been good days too.  There were days where I sat up in my dorm’s lobby, eating pancakes at one in the morning six feet away from friends, laughing over nothing and everything.  The day where I saw my parents for the first time in 6 months and cried as I hugged my mom.  The night of Fourth of July, when my summer roommates and I ran around our neighborhood, laughing as we chased down the best fireworks.  A night long before the breakup, where my ex and I sat on his couch and kissed so many times that he completely missed most of the plot of the movie we were watching.  The night of my birthday, where the socially distanced bonfire I’d planned fell to pieces because it was thunderstorming, and so we sat on the covered porch instead and told stories late into the night.  Days when I felt like I couldn’t go on because I felt so alone, and then I got a text from a friend asking how I was and I realized I had the strength to keep going after all.  The time I got piss drunk with my friend and we bitched about our exes and our families and watched the pilot episode of some sci-fi show and declared it to be peak cinema.  

And through all this, I think I’ve realized something about hope.  

Real hope isn’t the naive belief that things will magically get better.  That the universe is at its core fair and kind and gentle and the wicked and the good will get what is coming to them in life.  That someday my friends will wake up and their depression will be gone, their families will be whole, and life will be better. 

Real hope is knowing that the world sucks and choosing to act as though it doesn’t.  Hope is looking at a bleak world and saying, “no, I cannot accept this” and doing your best to be a light in the darkness.  Hope is knowing that the world is fundamentally broken and there’s not a damn thing you can do to change it.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it to die trying.  

Hope hurts.  Hope makes you vulnerable.  Hope will lead to you getting your heart broken again and again and again in more ways than you can imagine possible.  Hope is not and will never be the easier path.  

When I say it like that, hope sounds a lot like despair.  And honestly, maybe it is.  Maybe it really isn’t worth it.  Maybe there is nothing more to life than squeezing whatever fleeting moments of pleasure we can out of a dark, depressing mess.

But I choose to believe that there’s more.  I believe that this world is irrevocably fucked, but I also believe that this world will not last forever, and something better lies beyond.  And in the meantime, I believe that kindness matters, that helping matters, that love matters.  

And so I choose to go on.  I choose to try to do good, even in a messy, broken world where the right thing is never clear and sometimes you can hurt people when all you want to do is help.  I choose to love when my love will never be enough, to help even when my help still falls short of what is needed, to care even when there is nothing I can do to make things better.  

And so with defiance and determination, I will always choose hope. 

[l-w-meyer]

Be wary of what you speak aloud,

Lest you allow it to become real.

[l-w-meyer]

I’ve forgotten how to not love you.

It’s tragic, it’s pathetic, it’s wrong.  Because I know how you feel about me: you’ve made it very, very clear.  Because I know how I feel about you, and you are no longer someone I trust or sometimes even respect.

But still.  When I watch you dance, my heart skips a beat.  When you ask if you can come along during the 7 minute drive to McDonalds for the ride I say yes, because spending time with you is the drug that I’m addicted to - still! after 7 months, after all the hurt, after all the times when you told me with and without words that I was nothing to you.  When it’s four in the morning and we’re sitting together on a couch talking about music and there’s nothing I want more than to ask you to stay forever.  I think about kissing you before I fall asleep at night, because it’s better than remembering that I’m alone and that even when you’re here with me, you’re not.

[l-w-meyer]

I hate myself for it but I just want someone to do life together with.  

At this point I don’t even care whether it’s a romantic or platonic relationship.  I just want someone to come home to at the end of the day and they would ask me how my day was and I could ask them about theirs and just.  I want someone who I never get tired of spending time with and who I can watch movies with and fall asleep learning on their shoulder and.  Have 3am conversations about the meaning of life and whether good and evil are real and.  Laugh at the dumb stuff our cat does and take dumb selfies and.

I fervently believe, with all of my being, that you should never invest all of your well being in a single person.  Because no human is perfect and no one can be there for you all of the time - and if you expect someone to be your perfect source of support, sooner or later they will fail and hurt you or destroy themselves trying to be perfect.  

But at the same time.  Having someone you can always rely on is the most addictive feeling in the world.  It feels good to have someone who has your back, who you can always go to.  And God, I want that feeling back.  I want it back better than anything I can name.  

[l-w-meyer]

I didn’t know that your love was just a candle flame:

beautiful and gentle, 

but able to be snuffed out by the first careless breath,

never to be recovered.  

My love for you was a wildfire:

out of control

carelessly started by a match tossed into the lifeless brush.

I’ve done my best to dim the flames, 

but the embers still burn on.

[l-w-meyer]

The only things we can be sure about are death and taxes.

And God, I suppose, I'm pretty sure I can be certain about God. My own soul, perhaps? I think I’d know if I didn’t have one. Maybe. Perhaps that one isn’t certain...

Not you, never you. I don’t think I can ever be certain about another person, not truly. Because you never know when someone’s about to walk out of your life and never return, no matter how well you think you know them.

In these uncertain times. That’s the theme of the year, right? What can be certain when the world’s gone to hell? What can be certain when so many things that I thought were certain really, really weren’t?

[l-w-meyer]

The problem was, I think we were both in love with the sound of your voice.  

The problem is, it’s been six months and I think we both still are.

[l-w-meyer]

Selfish or selfless? Self-sacrificing or self-preserving?

Selfless or self-sacrificing?  Selfish or self-preserving?

Or just.  tired