Natalia Vela

I’m convinced it gives you some sort of satisfaction to see how much you can manipulate strong and beautiful women like me.

I tell her I’m scared a part of me will always hurt, that I think I’m a magnet to ruin, she asks me if there’s more. I tell her she should read more of my poetry to buy us more time for next week.

i’m wishing i could see you now,
wishing i could kiss you now,
sink my teeth down into your bottom lip now,
wishing i could throw my fists into your chest now.
this.

You’ve always been there. Treading the shallow waters of my consciousness. Never straying too far from land.

They lay a finger on you and you shudder. They call you “babe” and it used to make you feel warm, but now all you can think about is how you don’t want to hear that come out their mouth anymore.

I know I’m not the girl you fall in love with, or the girl you even chase. I’m not the girl you text good morning to or think about in the middle of your day. I know these things because I’ve been here before.

Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s lonelier to waste your time and rent out your body to someone who doesn’t know your worth than it is to be alone? You deserve to be more than an afterthought. Stop getting ready “just in case.” You are all you need to fill all the empty space.

I’m thinking about your bottom lip, about how tender it felt between my teeth. I’m thinking about your mouth, about how it stopped my world, how it got me high, how I never wanted to come down.

It hurt. Doing this hurt. Caring about him hurt. Being his friend hurt. Loving him hurt. Letting him go for a final time, letting him go in all seriousness hurt. And I still am not sorry, I still wouldn’t take any of it back.

I’m imagining a mouth – unhurried but hungry, pulsating between rough and soft. I’m imagining hands. Hands that bruise and hands that love. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know his face. But I know what he makes me feel.

Stop acting like you’re special. We don’t all want to date you. We aren’t all in love with you. Don’t get all bent out of shape and weirded out over a text, or over any kind of interest in your life or who you are as a person. If I like you, I will make it known.

It’s thoughts of your hands, my lips, your mouth, my skin. And there’s an aching for something not here. A longing for something hollowed out from my body. I pretend I never loved you, I’m afraid I always will.

If you’re going to love someone who has been cheated on, do it wholeheartedly, do so with purity. Unpack your baggage in front of them. Let them in. Doing so makes this person feel not only like you trust them, but like they can feel comfortable trusting you and doing the same.

In a world without depression, I wouldn’t be a master of pretending. The simplest of things wouldn’t exhaust me. If I didn’t have depression I wouldn’t go through those weeks where I avoid human contact at all costs.

I think I’d much prefer it this way until I hold hands with someone who makes me feel like the stars tangled themselves between our fingers.

I wouldn’t mind it, being in a room alone with you, getting to know you, opening myself up. I just find myself intrigued by you. I’ve never been more curious. I have a feeling we speak the same language.

I’m done hanging on to your words, done listening to the songs you send me through the periods we go without speaking, done ever believing you actually ever felt something for me.

I waited, I wished, to see you turn back and say I choose you, be with me, but you didn’t. It’s the most physical kind of wanting and of aching I’ve ever known.