2.

Dear Free Spirit,

You were the grace. You were the hard, cold beauty and the soft, warm pain, and I never wanted you.

I only wanted to violently ink you onto scratchy paper and carve you into pale skin and it's funny - I don't think you ever would have been more real, more tangible, more here. I wanted saturated black letters and hope in white spaces. I wanted to fold you into loudly starched pages and forget you in the dirtied water draining at my feet.

You were the hum and the echo and the spaces in between: I could never hold you, and that made me feel weak. You shouted politics, hunger, bladder needs and all, so brazenly confident we cared, but you never answered to us - the master of confrontation, never once confronted. You will never read this letter, and I will never know why I wrote it, but at least I know now - I loved you, but it wasn't you I wanted.

Maybe I wanted to stumble across you via the product of me again come years from today and remember that you were the hard, cold beauty and the soft, warm pain, but I wrote you into words. I wrote you into truth (and in return, you let me bloom).

I made you.

But I never wanted you.

I'm sorry,

Chloe

"Yes. The fundamental mistake I had always made -- and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make -- was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl." (John Green, Paper Towns)

1.

Deceptively playful, you are upbeat and tragic, you are the trills fluttering around in the quiet background, subtle and resilient. You are green-blue specks of heartbreak, of ocean foam-- you are one beautiful, maddening part of the grand build-up to the line that pulled me apart two years ago and continues to wreak havoc on my heart today. ("You go on and I'll be happier.")

But I love you. You let me sad-smile at my canvas alone in the back closet. (But I wasn't really alone. After all, you were there.) You let me feel the waves of hurt, you taught me to imagine that they were made of ocean, and so I loved you every night he was gone. And I loved you every morning, as I was cooped up and crowded, methodically making dusty purple clouds, as if producing the perfect rolling desert clouds could somehow blow him back to me. You helped me cope. Shame on me for feeling this surge of gratitude only because I need you again.