the story told without words

this is the story of a girl who fell in love.

 this is the story told in words that do not come gently, but rather as torrents of water bending the windowpanes. this is the story carved from the things that i am made of and pushed into the middle of sunlit rooms so that the world can stare in wonder. this is the beauty spewing from an unbeautiful mouth, the love gushing forward from the split ribs of a body that simply cannot contain anymore. this is not composed of large, sweeping generalizations and observations of the world, but rather is built upon the small whispers of dawn. if you split open the spine of this novel, you will find the vertebrae of the story in the details: you reaching over to tuck stray hair behind my ear; the fold of your skin at the corner of your crooked smile; the fluttering wings in the peach pit of my stomach. if you break down my individual parts, you will see them as the inconsequential entities that they are. you will see the way the wind comes to lift me up and carry me out to sea. the way i spread like ash, my different parts nothing more than periods and commas, adjectives strung together with nouns in dog-eared notebooks. oh, but if you change your perspective. if you ride upon the eagle, you will see the sum and the whole and the globe of the earth that rests between my lungs. you will see the way the ocean of stars love has caused to sprout along my clavicle, the garden of planets orbiting my thigh. you will see i am more than i am as i tell this story, the way the words have come together to build me up. the way this story has swallowed me whole and amplified the reality until i'm not longer sure the places where it bleeds into fiction. oh, but you should also know: i am not writing words in the hopes that i will shine them upon the night. i do not care to let the entire world find my signature in andromeda. i am not singing tales in hopes that i will feed my voice through the winding breeze and let it wash upon the foreign city walls. i am only weaving my story, because in the space between heartbeats, it is the only thing that keeps my cells from decomposing. i am blind and sculpting abstractions out of the wet sand pinched between finger and thumb. i am breathing shallow and quick, deep and long, i am imagining you in the heat that comes as the tide. my love has made me more than i am, has catapulted me and fed me until i have the universe encapsulated in my throat. my love has made me selfish, has caused me to not care about earthly means, leaving me alone in abandoned corners feeding on the emotion for nutrition. you see, i am sitting in the middle of an empty room with no windows, and though i am alone, i know you are here. in white walls, i see the shadow of your silhouette, and in the silence, i can hear the rhythmic beating of your pulse. i am filling the void with the verbs that do not bring you here and the adjectives that are not synonyms for the way my heart palpates when your breath shudders against my neck. i am carving and creating and breaking it to start over once more. and someday, i will find the words to tell because this is the story of a girl who fell in love – the story of the love who fell in a girl.