To swim

It's how I would imagine drowning

Slowly, treading water, tired

Then, before you realise, you find it harder and harder to find the air to fill your lungs

The best part is the silence, water covering over your head, softening the noise of the outside world. Softening the edges of your vision, suffocating/starving your brain /so/ you want to stay under the surface forever

The second best part is that first gasp when you fling your head above the water and let go of all you have been holding

I was that girl waiting, too comfortable in your darkness. Blurry vision and with a piercing pressure in my chest.

I am that girl wanting to swim, wanting to breath in

Wanting to taste the salt on my lips

Wanting to make plans for dinner

Now I swim free.

- Nicole xx

Little voices

I hear little echoes in everything I do

Telling me to not be scared as I merge onto a freeway; they'll move for me.

Of mum telling me I'd look great if it weren't for my arms in my wedding dress.

More housework, don't sit down. 

"You had a whole day off

What did you do?"

Day to day, I feel reverberations surrounding me; strangling me.

"Keep those emails short

No one reads them anyway"

Keep them succinct, they don't value my time, and I'm telling them not value theirs by imposing my views onto them.

I hear little whispers, little voices in my ear.

"Don't eat that. You don't need it."

"Didn't you go to the gym?"

"Why didn't you do that yesterday?"

Now I hear you. Whispering in my ear. A ghost tied gently to me.

"They are so lucky to have you."

"That's because you care."

"You saying this shows how far you have come."

You always see the best in me, talk me down from the ledge, clear the fog from the storm clouds around me.

Little voices are no longer sirens but whispers carried softly on the crashing waves at high tide.

- Nicole xx

In between the past and the future

Thirty years.

Thirty years and I have realised that love has no perfect timeline to follow; there is no ideal path to falling in love.

There is no right or wrong way to give yourself to someone in pieces shattered from another, and completely raw that you don't even realise who you are or how you like your coffee. There is no manual or map to finding yourself when you've fallen off the grid.

But somehow you were ready all the same and accepted me and sewed me back together. No: you made me new.

There are words throughout history for what I feel: Rebirthed. My very own Renaissance period. 

A renewal, a resurrection, a resurgence. A revival.

And Now...

Love can be felt in your arms reaching towards me and enveloping me in the darkness as we're snuggled in bed close.

Love can be seen in the curve of your smile and the way you look at me like I am all you see.

Love can be shared in every bite of our dessert, in every inside joke, in each pet becoming our home. 

Love can be seen in your actions as you plan dates and wash dishes, and cook pasta, and fold laundry.

Love can be waited to be said aloud until the socially right moment, but it doesn't mean it wasn't felt before.

Love is unravelling your walls in bookshop aisles, glancing over covers and glazing over as they find mine.

The receiver is never shocked. The receiver will return the three most important words you have waited a lifetime to hear. 

And to feel.

Whether it's right by others isn't important; sometimes you just know.

Love is yearning to touch you, to kiss you, to feel you in my heart; treasuring the ordinary with you.

Reaching over to hold my hand against my thigh warmed by the sun and my own racing heart, and I look at you and love you right in that moment between the past and the future, in the short space between my heart beats.

I heal.

- Nicole xx

Loving you was a dream

 I watched my brother get married today.

My only brother.

They looked deeply into each other's eyes and declared that forever was long enough for them and not a nightmare waiting to unfold.

And I remembered ourselves declaring the same yet failing somewhere along the way. 

I know now that we should have never gone through with it. We were young and in love but not a "match made in heaven" like we had always wished we were.

There is nothing wrong with being with someone for the moments you want to share with someone else. And I never, not once, regretted going to all these beautiful places with you.

I write you these poems, for me. 

I write them to understand and then, hopefully, move on. Not to forget but to remember and think of fondly instead of with pain and heartbreak.

I write these poems for me, not you.

You, the essence, lives on with me, but you the man who was dishonest and horrible and pushed me to the brink... You will never be a part of this poem. You were abandoned the moment I left the house.

I watched my brother and sister-in-law move forward with their lives while I, too, move forward with mine.

Loving you was a dream. 

Living with you was a nightmare.

Good night.

- Nicole xx

Memories = lifetimes

When it's late at night and 

I'm laying staring at the decorative moulding 

on the ceiling

making out it's curves in the moonlight

I have flashbacks 

to when it was only you and me.

Us.

Standing in a parking garage, deep below the earth, waiting for you to pay the ticket so we can go back to our home and cuddle under the blanket on the couch and watch our favourite movie for the millionth time.

After a date, listening to our favourite songs on the drive home with your hand on my lap, smiling through your glasses. 

Feeling the sand between my toes at the beach in Dubrovnik, watching the waves cover your legs as you dig through the sand on the edge of the world to delicately pick out the soft shards of sea glass for me.

I've lived many lives in 29 years

I thought I'd live the rest of them with you

Now I'm back in my 18 year old body

Starting anew

Angry at the world

I remember my first love

My first heart break

My first guilt

My first separation, like a part of my heart was ripped out and left behind.

I remember my wedding

And I remember being alone

I remember dancing with everyone but you while you drank beer outside with the boys. Maybe that's why we ran low so quickly.

I have lived a lifetime with you

Now I live a lifetime in my dreams where I see our house, our children, our cats, our family -- and I forget when I wake up it's all been erased.

I see you in the waves at the beach

And in my nephew's brown eyes

And in the way my student throws back and laughs with a cunning grin like you did when you were up to something.

And I see you at the table playing boardgames with me until 2am with a cat on each of our laps.

And I feel your warmth in Nala's purrs as I cuddle her at night.

And I hear your voice in my ear teaching me how to drive around the tight mountainous corners on our road trips.

And I see you napping on the couch after a long day of teaching, curled up with your hands over your heads and a blanket half-strewn over your tangled legs.

And I see 

I see

I see the times I shouted at you, and your strained eyes, and your averted gaze while I pummelled you verbally over and over again, deserving in the moment but undeserving by all means. A horrifying truth to realise too little, too late. I see my anger through your eyes, hands raised, brows narrowed, hatred in my eyes at the life you had torn from me until we reached this precipice of no return.

I see now, looking in the mirror, what you saw all these years and how I took you down while you lives your lifetimes in fear of change and unrest and terror, while I lived in frustration and confusion and distrust.

But how wondrous is it to imagine another lifetime ahead of me?

A second life full of all the hope and dreams I wanted, laid out to start anew.

And to imagine and yearn for the same for you.

Will it be hard?

Will it be worth it?

Will it be filled with further heartbreak?

That is the gift of the future.

If I watched my life in replay, what would I see? Which parts would I focus on, now?

I hope it's a long replay. I hope it's full of it all.

- Nicole xx

I hope

One day you'll grow up,

but I would have forgotten all about you by then.

One day you'll grow up,

and you'll be the same age I was when I taught you.

I hope you regret the way you spoke to me,

And the way you treated me less-than-anything,

And I hope you'll lie awake at night staring at the ceiling regretting all the horrible ways you tortured me

Just as I lie awake now trying to come up with strategies to engage you in English tomorrow.

And years from now when I have forgotten you and all the yous like you,

I hope you think of me, your teachers, your peers and your parents and regret your actions.

And above all, I hope you have changed.

One day you'll grow up

 One day you'll grow up --

I'd been waiting for you to do that for a while but you weren't quite ready back then. It's what I always hoped you'd do for me but hope now you'll do on your own.

One day you'll grow up

and know deep in your soul that the washing must be done before you run out of clean clothes, and the dishes covered in last week's scraps of food will rot in the sink and stink up the house if you don't put them in the dishwasher, and the cats need to be fed and have clean water every day, and the garden required mowing at least once a month.

One day you'll grow up

and it will all make sense to you that clothes go in drawers and can be hung up on hangers, and rubbish can go in the bin under the sink, and then once a week you can take the bins out to the curb to be emptied, and dinner can be cooked and we can sit together at the kitchen table and discuss our day together.

One day you'll grow up 

and realise what it means to be a man - not in the literal masculine sense but in the sense of caring about how you lived and loved in a space with another - and not take for granted the multitudes of love and patience I gave you, unconditionally. 

One day you'll grow up

and realize that I was not trying to change you beyond your inherent self, for the worse. I realise I enabled you too much, and hope that without me there now, you find the self you should have always been without me getting in the way. Maybe you will think of me as the one that got away; as the flower that slowly wilts moving into Autumn as the weather cools and the world dulls. And then maybe you'll realise I was not the only cause of becoming duller all on my own.

One day you'll grow up

and I would have forgotten all about you by then.

And I hope you regret the way you spoke to me,

And the way you treated me less than anything,

And you'll lie awake at night staring at the ceiling regretting all the horrible ways you tortured me,

Just as I lie awake now trying to come to terms with the guilt, the regret, the hurt, the betrayal, and the exhaustion you caused.

And years from now when I have forgotten you and all the yous like you,

I hope when you think of me, you think about you.

The moment

Cheating doesn't start the moment you have sex

Or the moment your lips touch

Or the first time you hold her hand

Or tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear

It starts the moment you put her above me

And the moment you decide in your heart you want to know what it feels like to do all those things with her.

And the moment you think of her first even when you wake up laying next to me.

Golden Hour

It's not sleeping together that's the problem: it's the staying awake together thats the real killer.

There's something deadly and dangerous and just damn delicious when you stare into each other's eyes and share your darkest secrets between whispers and soft smiles. There's a calculated risk we all take when we open our hearts to someone new, hoping they hold it closely to their own.

The night stretches out infinitely, consistently, like we've done this a thousand times. Lived a thousand lives. Shared a thousand moments.

I love him in the moment between dead and alive; between dusk and dawn; between his half closed eyes and parted lips, and his hand resting delicately on my wrist.

As the sun tears open the darkness, I am lost in this golden hour. Sunken eyes looking longingly at each other until we blink away the darkness and start anew.

There's a killer in this bed, and it's neither one of us: there's a killer in this bed and it's the space between light and dark.

Oh, to be loved by a woman

 Oh, to be loved by a woman:

So beautiful it makes your insides ache and curl around the very last morsel of her.

Oh, to be loved by a woman,

whose eyes you get lost in, caught in her gaze like a fly to a venice flytrap.

Oh, to be loved by a woman:

One touch is like fire and ice burning together on my naked 

Oh, to be loved by a woman.

To have her care so deeply and so infinitely, you will be her whole world and all she asks is you listen and treat her with kindness.

And even if you don't, she will hold on to you so tightly, never letting go. Helping you to grow. Hoping you change. Loving you completely despite the loneliness growing like a stormcloud within her.

She can't help but love the idea of you.

Of all you could be.

Of everything she hopes you already are.

But she does not deserve to love a mere idea, a whisper on the wind; an unchanging season. 

She deserves to be loved by a man who isn't me.