Affair With Words

A Love Affair with Words Writing has always been my solace. Short stories, unfinished novels, and scraps of paper with seemingly brilliant “one-liners” were scattered throughout my life for as long as I can remember. Poetry was the one thing that had never made any sense to me. Songs were poems, and when I tried to write songs, they always ended horribly. No matter how hard I tried to force rhymes and stanzas out of my brain onto paper, nothing ever seemed to fit quite right. Poems had to be about something meaningful. Nothing had ever meant enough to me to be able to write a substantial poem, up until six months ago. Six months ago, I found out that poems are not just words and rhymes. Poems are people.
I met a girl whose smile could melt

Though it was late, something in me made me feel compelled to go. When I arrived, she was covered in baggy sweat pants and an old tee shirt. She stood at the top of her driveway, slipping her fingers nervously through her hair. My heart pounded against my ribcage like it was trying to escape my body and run straight into her hands. We did not sleep that night. We stayed up until six o’clock the next morning, despite the fact that we had school and both of us were exhausted. She laid next to me, our bodies intertwined like tangled headphones. Our breathing became one. Something about the way her smile was crooked on one side, the way the heat of her body seemed to warm the entire room, and the way she made me comfortably nervous was the most dangerous thing I had ever had to face thus far. It was terrifying, but she was so appealing. The remainder of the week consisted of me driving to her house in the darkness of the night, falling victim to her arms and her bed, and driving the two of us to school the following day. Her eyes would trail behind me in the hallway as she scuttered with her feet practically under mine. She would smile every time I looked in her direction. Everything I did became her. Everywhere I went, I could see her eyes and feel her smile sitting on my shoulders. Every part of me was wrapped up in

I tried to evict her, but she remained, roots deep. I realized that the only way to get rid of her was to forget about her like she forgot about me. How was I supposed to forget about the girl who made life seem worth living again? I wrote. Poem after poem, I wrote. They turned from lines filled with love and desire, to pages of sorrow and depth. I wrote about how she left me. I wrote poems directed at her, asking how she could leave me when I needed her more than my lungs needed air. As the poems stacked up in the corner of my room, my feelings slowly diminished, wasting away as the hours and days