the boys i've loved & the end of the world

by Catarine Hancock

  your eyes are full of anger,

  your sneer is full of hate.

  you never seemed to understand

  you have to watch the steps you take.

  your methods of forgetting

  are far less than futile

  you know you can't erase

  how you felt when you saw me smile.

  so call me what you please,

  say i was a mistake

  but you can't always reverse

  what you thought was fate.

  -c.h.

  tidal

  she is the moon and i am the beach;

  she is strong and i am weak.

  you are the ocean, stuck between,

  and she keeps pulling you away from me.

  she is always there, tugging you back,

  but she shows herself at night, when the sky is black.

  her skin is pale, her eyes are bright,

  it's the reason i ask: why even put up a fight?

  you come to me in the morning,

  and hold me tight at noon,

  but when the evening comes you leave again,

  just like you always do.

  she is the moon and i am the beach,

  she is strong and i am weak.

  though she always gives you back to me,

  it just hurts more each time you leave.

  you are the beautiful ocean,

  trapped in this game of tug o' war,

  but soon i'll be eroded,

  and have nothing left to give you (or her) anymore.

  -c.h.

  what ruined us (or maybe you just didn't care)

  i loved you

  vibrantly. entirely.

  constantly.

  like there was nothing

  else in the world

  worth loving.

  like you were the end.

  i loved you

  angrily. maddeningly.

  yearningly.

  like the distance

  was the only problem.

  like it was the only reason

  you weren't always there.

  i loved you

  sadly. delicately.

  wishfully.

  like you were breaking me

  but i still wouldn't blame you.

  like your promises were real

  and you actually believed in them.

  you loved me

  casually. easily.

  partially.

  like i didn't mean as much

  as you said i did.

  like you didn't love me

  at all.

  -c.h.

  the boys i've loved and the end of the world #3

  “do you think it’ll be quick or slow?” i ask him. we are sitting

  on a bench, separate sides, but it is comfortable.

  “i’m not sure. do you think it’ll hurt?” he responds, looking at

  me with eyes that have never been anything but kind.

  “i’m sorry if i ever hurt you,” i blurt out, because i feel like i

  need to say it.

  “you didn’t break my heart,” he says honestly, “we fell apart in

  a way that didn’t let you.”

  “i wouldn’t have even if i’d had the chance.” there is a pause,

  and the trees cast shadows over us. “you taught me how to love

  myself, i hope you know that.”

  he smiles. “i didn’t teach you anything. you learned how to on

  your own.”

  “it was because of you, though.” i pause, then ask, “do you tell

  her that you love her every chance you get?”

  “of course.” he fumbles with his hands. “there’s only so many

  chances left to say it, anyways.”

  we sit together, and i tuck my knees into my chest and rest my

  chin on them. he watches the sky, frowning, and i want to say

  that he is too good to be wiped out by a solar flare, but i don’t.

  instead i say, “i’m so fucking scared.”

  he reaches over and rests his hand on my shoulder. “me too.”

  “i learned from you that love doesn’t always have to end nasty.

  sometimes, it just stops.”

  he nods, agreeing, and squeezes my shoulder once.

  “maybe that’ll be how the world ends,” he suggests, “it won’t

  end terribly. it’ll just stop.”

  -c.h.

  so this is how it feels to have someone give up on you

  i remember when you first

  told me you loved me,

  and you held my hands in yours and

  whispered it again and again

  in my ear until i was in tears,

  and my heart was flying out of my chest.

  there is so much time and space

  between us now and i do not know

  how to make it go away.

  i do not like the distance in the slightest

  but i can not figure out how

  to make it disappear. i don’t think

  you ever wanted to leave, really.

  but you have always been impatient.

  i spend my time counting out

  the minutes and seconds and days

  and hours that have passed since

  you’ve gone.

  i know you are with her;

  it hurts me so, but i cannot forget it,

  no matter how hard i try.

  it’s funny how the most painful memories

  are the ones that stay.

  she is not a poet like i am.

  she cannot make you sound beautiful

  the way i do, she cannot write you

  love poems that can be framed

  and put on the wall.

  i hope she doesn’t love you as well as i did,

  as well as i do, so maybe you will realize, me.

  after all this time.

  one time, you told me you wanted

  to marry me. i think you still do,

  deep down. i hope she hears it when

  you say my name. “i don’t love her, anymore,”

  you tell her, but all she hears is,

  “i do, i do.”

  -c.h.

  cherry blossom kisses

  age seven: when you can finally understand what the preacher is saying, you start telling your parents to read you part of the bible every night. it was almost as though the stories they told were bedtime stories, fiction, but your parents read them with such conviction and your preacher cried out to God with such trust and devotion that you decide there's no way so many people live their lives through a fairytale. you find church boring, so your parents sign you up for Sunday school and you spend it playing with cars and talking about fairness with a mahogany-haired boy your age.

  age eight: your friend is in your third grade class and you sit on the swings at recess. he tells you he doesn't understand any of the bible. you confess that you don't understand it either, but all of the adults do, so one day the two of you will understand its meaning too. he says his older brother has been hanging out with a boy a lot recently. "just like us," you point out, but he shakes his head. "no," he whispers, "like they go in his bedroom and shut the door. there's no sounds or anything. i don't even think they play video games."

  age nine: one day he shows up crying at Sunday school. "they found him... kissing the other boy," he sobs and your mouth gapes, horrified. he presses himself into you and you hug him like a good friend would. "dad hit him and mommy cried." you ask your parents if you can take him home for the afternoon. you planned on taking his mind off of it, but you end up sitting in your bedroom with the door shut, not even playing video games.

  age ten: he spends most of his time at your house. whenever he can escape his parents he appears at your door. his brother hasn't been around for a year or so. sometimes he'll cry into your shoulder and your heart hurts for him.

  age eleven: you have your first Valentine: a girl
your age, with hair as golden as the sun and eyes as green as the leaves in summer. she hands you the heart-shaped card after school, her cheeks red from both the chilly air and nerves. you say yes, but no heat rises to your cheeks. you smile and she reaches out and holds your hand. your fingertips are numb by the time you let go as she steps onto her bus, but you assume it's because the cold.

  age twelve: you have your first kiss, with your first Valentine. it's at his birthday party. she pulls you away from him as he blows out the candles and tugs you behind a tree. "i like you a lot," she murmure shyly. she goes up on her tiptoes and presses her lips against yours. "fireworks, he kept saying it felt like fireworks," he'd said about his brother. her lips held no spark.

  age thirteen: you don't talk to that girl anymore, the girl who kissed you at his birthday party last year. she moved last winter, but for some reason it didn't bother you. you stay glued to his side, or rather he stays glued to yours, but either way you like the way things are. you join the church choir for the hell of it, but as you sing about God's love you find your voice falling flat.

  age fourteen: you enter high school, nervous but reassured with him next to you. you smile broadly when you're with him; he's your best friend, the only friend you'd ever need. on the five year anniversary of the night his parents caught his brother, he shows up at your door and cries because his brother still hasn't called and his parents don't care anymore. "'monster,' they call him, 'abomination.' but he isn't that. he's just a human," he whispers, and you wonder when he got so mature.

  age fifteen: you go to your first big party and one of the older kids talks you into drinking. you end up drunk and stumble through the crowd, trying to find him. when you do, he's sitting on the curb with his head in his hands. you mumble something incomprehensible and sit next to him. "do you think you'll remember anything about tonight, tomorrow?" he asks, and you shake your head, laughing. "so you won't remember this." he kisses you under the street lamp. sparks. you remembered nothing but that the next morning.

  age sixteen: you never ask him about that party. and he never brings it up, until one night his brother shows up at his house with the same boy he'd been caught with holding his hand. they have gotten married, and are about to finish college. they've applied to adopt a baby. they are happy, successful. his parents take one look at their intertwined fingers and slam the door in their faces. soon after, he shows up at your door, and you pull him into your room. "i'm afraid," he admits through tears, "i'm afraid i'm going to end up just like my brother; shunned and hated by my family." you tell him no, grab his shoulders and tell him that isn't possible. "yes it is," he whispers, "last year, at the party..." "i know," you say, and he blinks before he kisses you again.

  age seventeen: you secretly hold hands in church, underneath your suit jackets. his hand sends electricity up your arm and through your body, and you stare down the preacher as he shouts about sin and love and hell. after the service, he takes you to the cemetery out back and kisses you furiously behind a tree. "i love you," he says, "i need you." you kiss him hard in response, but then you feel a hand that isn't his clamp down on your shoulder. you jolt away from him and find your father glaring at you, furious and hateful. he glances at your intertwined fingers and yanks you away from him. "i will not have a faggot in my family," he snarls, "why am i not surprised you're one too?" your father sneers at him, "you already have one ungodly creature in your family." you're being pulled away from him, your father's grip is tight on your wrist, you say, "i love you," and your father slaps you. he drags you home and hits you again and again while your mother cries and begs for him to stop, but he keeps hitting you...

  age eighteen: it's been one year since your father beat you to death in your kitchen. he still visits you every week, lays a new bouquet on your grave. always cherry blossoms; from the tree he last kissed you under. your mother stops by sometimes, more out of obligation and public reputation than grief. your father can't visit you from a jail cell, nor would he want to. sometimes when he comes to your grave, he brings the bible you'd had when you were a kid, and stares at its faded cover. one day, he rips the pages to shreds, each one of them, tears streaking his cheeks. "we just fell in love," he cries, "we just did what God told us to do."

  -c.h.

  i will always find you too beautiful to bear

  i have spent hours

  flipping through poetry books

  trying to find something

  that portrays just how

  lovely he is to me,

  but i haven't found

  a single stanza that

  explains it well enough.

  i do not think he has eyes

  as blue as the ocean

  or hair as golden as the sun;

  cliché metaphors don't

  do him justice.

  he is not a sentence that's been

  written a million times by

  a million different people

  who have never met him--

  why should it be used to describe him

  when they don't know who they're describing?

  when you step outside

  on the first day of spring,

  everything is green,

  the sky is blue,

  and you can smell

  the beauty in the air--

  that is him,

  fresh and bright and beautiful.

  i want to tell him this,

  tell him just how beautiful

  he is to me,

  but i can't.

  you see,

  he is so beautiful,

  but he isn't mine.

  -c.h.

  writer’s block

  and i wish i could write

  about you,

  because i want to tell

  the world

  how beautiful you are

  to me.

  but i can't,

  and as you press

  your lips into my

  collarbone,

  i think,

  maybe this is a good thing.

  maybe this is just

  for us.

  -c.h.

  eyes

  you know how they say the eyes are the windows to the soul? that's how it is when i meet your gaze from across the room. when i find you, and blue meets brown and everything freezes. and for a moment, just a single moment, the world shifts around us.

  everything we were flashes past. for an instant, i can feel how it felt to be loved by you again; a feeling i thought i didn't know anymore.

  but then, i am transported back to the present, and i am stuck now with what we have become: a shattered, empty shell of what once was the strongest love i'd ever known. and it saddens me, not because i still love you, but because i know that if we had worked a little harder, i still would. i know that if i had spoken up sooner instead of burying it all inside of me, i would still be completely tied up in you.

  i let you get away with things i normally would have never stood for. i let you kiss other girls because distance was hard and we needed that release. i let you stop talking to me for days because i knew you had a busy schedule. i made excuse, after excuse, after excuse for you, because i didn't want to see the truth. eventually, i had to raise my head and meet its burning gaze. and by then, it was too late.

  when we lock eyes from across the room, i can hear everything you want to say. i can see the pain and the anger and the sadness and i know you can see it in my eyes too.

  eyes are the windows to the soul. my soul says, "i'm sorry we never got a real chance." your soul whispers back, "i'm sorry i made you think i didn't want one."

  -c.h.

  in short

  the way you dipped

  your fingers into me

  left me widemouthed

  and empty.

  you took everything.

  -c.h.

  an excerpt (#3)

  "tell me, why do we romanticize pain?" he asks, staring not at her, but up at the clouds.

  "
i think we do it to understand it better," she answers, and he frowns.

  "how does that work? there's nothing beautiful about pain. beautiful things can come out of pain, sure, but pain in and of itself is not beautiful."

  "maybe... maybe, we do it because it's the only way we can stand to think about it. we, as humans, we want to reject the ugly things in life. take 'ugly' with a grain of salt, though, because in the past, those we have rejected for being 'ugly' weren't ugly at all. but our brains are limited, and easily corrupted by preconceived ideas. so maybe, because we can't get rid of pain, we try and make it more glamorous, so we won't just shut it away. because part of coping with pain in a healthy way is being open about it."

  he laughs, and looks at her. "you're very smart, you know that?"

  she feels herself blushing. "i guess."

  he touches her hand, briefly. "it doesn't make it right, does it?" he inquires, "it's not good to make pain seem beautiful. it makes people think being in pain is good, that it makes you beautiful. so really, by trying to understand it better, we really aren't understanding it at all."

  "well, nobody wants to be sad, but everyone wants to be beautiful, whatever their definition of 'beautiful' may be. so if you're sad, romanticizing it may be the only way to feel beautiful."

  "but it's toxic. it hurts you. if you become so convinced that your pain is beautiful, that it's art, then you never want to be happy."

  "i wouldn't say that," she squints her eyes, pursing her lips, "everyone wants to be happy. but i think... i think people just settle, after awhile. they get tired. so they rest assured knowing that people on social media find their sadness attractive and romantic, so they still feel beautiful, in a sense."