Milk and Honey

by Rupi Kaur

the woman who comes after me will be a bootleg version of who i am. she will try and write poems for you to erase the ones i’ve left memorized on your lips but her lines could never punch you in the stomach the way mine did.

more than anything i want to save you from myself

it must hurt to know i am your most beautiful regret

2017.

i am the town surrounding it the one you’ve never heard of but always pass through

you give and give till they pull everything out of you and leave you empty

i had to leave i was tired of allowing you to make me feel anything less than whole

is. to think at such a ripe young age i’d experienced the most exhilarating person i’d ever meet. how i’d spend the rest of my life just settling.

i don’t know what living a balanced life feels like when i am sad i don’t cry i pour when i am happy i don’t smile i glow when i am angry i don’t yell i burn

the abused and the abuser - i have been both

your voice alone drives me to tears

i don’t know why i split myself open for others knowing sewing myself up hurts this much afterward

people go but how they left always stays

love is not a game we have made a game out of love

how can our love die if it’s written in these pages

but that isn’t romantic. it isn’t sweet. the idea that they were so engulfed by your existence they had to risk breaking it for the sake of knowing they weren’t the one missing out. your existence meant that little next to their curiosity of you.

isn’t it sad and funny how people have more guts these days to undress you with their fingers than they do to pick up the phone and call. apologize.

the thing about writing is i can’t tell if it’s healing or destroying me

you tell me i am not like most girls and learn to kiss me with your eyes closed something about the phrase—something about how i have to be unlike the women i call sisters in order to be wanted makes me want to spit your tongue out

just being a woman calling myself a woman makes me utterly whole and complete

from now on i will say things like you are resilient or you are extraordinary not because i don’t think you’re pretty but because you are so much more than that

you must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself first