Manahil Sultan

“My heart has been broken a million times by the same hand, yet I would let it happen a million times again if it meant it was by you.
I was weaker than I thought / my heart sagging like the stems of uncut, unkempt flowers because of the sunlight you held in your faraway heart / Maybe you weren't mine to love / I think I'm falling
The wallpaper above her bed frame was glued in my brain the way it was glued against her walls / I got so close to running my fingers against it / I wish I felt the confidence to tell you the truth, as strongly as I felt stubborn to hide it
Do you hear that? That's my heart knocking against my chest at the sight of you / I've never heard anything more terrifying / how could you provide me air and suffocate me at the same time?
Blue hydrangeas, pink tulips, red bleeding hearts / it's all you ever loved, but never yourself / I never understood why anyone spoke poorly of the color brown, it was a dream on you
And that kiss... I think about it all the time / was it wrong of me to think of you when you were never mine? / I feel lucky to have had you, but dismayed to know what life is like without you
Don't worry if the flowers pass, I'll be right there to plant you more / and when the soil grows old, I'll comfort it in the chaos of the storm
Am I a ghost in your story? / because you look at me with conviction when I don't even know the crime I committed
Burden me with your secrets / so I can carry the weight you're so fearful of letting go
To be close to you was to be haunted by what I couldn't have and to be reminded of how much I truly wanted you / and I'd be lying if I said I never thought about where my hands would take me across your body
Midnights and daydreaming hours of retracing steps to how we possibly got here / how did I ever let time pass this long without seeing you? / my heart was so full of our memories that painted my body like a scrapbook
I tried to stop loving you, but along the way, you found your way into the sound of my laugh, the style of my writing, and the threads of my clothes / I would've gone down on my knees just to hear you say yes
Neck stiff, legs weak, eyes set on what we could've looked like if you hadn't left / 'moving on' was a broken record that I never had the strength to lift the needle off of / If hearts were meant to love then why did mine feel so empty? / and suddenly, I fell
Glances, gazes, eyes following places they shouldn't have seen / intimacy was to be seen by you; free falling was to be touched by you / there was no such thing as a crowded room where you stood
She lives in between the pinks and yellows of the world / where a beautiful color is unknown to others / and when she speaks, I become a bee enthralled in a field of daisies”
― Liana Cincotti, Picking Daisies on Sundays