Light Filters In: Poems

by Caroline Kaufman

there is nothing more powerful than a girl with a pen who is brave enough to use it.

I’ve spent so much time trying to become who I should be that I lost myself along the way.

I am black and white dots in a body shaded gray, and I don’t know which part of myself is the truth anymore.

I am going stir-crazy inside my skull, peeling off the wallpaper with short, bitten nails. there are no emergency exits here: I am left to claw myself out.

my head is the one that’s guilty, but my soul is always blamed.

it’s survival of the fittest, not everyone will thrive. we’re pushed so far that we go against the instinct to survive.

then I sabotage myself, picking out poisoned apples and eating them like candy. I am the antagonistic protagonist of my own story.

sacrifice is not as glamorous as it’s made out to be.

right now, I am a rough draft; I am here to be revisited and revised.

I am an incomplete masterpiece, full of crossed-out words and changes. no one ever calls the first draft beautiful, and I will never be the final piece.

I know I shouldn’t rely on love from other people. but if someone else can love me, that means it’s possible for me to do it as well. conclusion: I am lovable.

my memory of you is bittersweet; a sugarcoated bullet in my brain. and when I try to think of the deceit, saccharine drowns out all of the pain.

it’s just hide-and-seek. he slipped away, now I spend my lifetime searching.

I have to decide: this is where I surrender, or this is where I finally make peace with myself.

I’m sure you’ve been offered the world, but my pockets have all been worn through. so I’ll write you an ocean, I’ll write you a sky, and hope that’s enough for you.

the problem was not asking him to complete me. the problem was believing I was incomplete to begin with.

you were the first to fall in love. the first to fall out. it was as if there was a lag in my version of reality. as if you were a time zone ahead while sitting right next to me.

some days I’m okay, while others pull me to the ground. I’ll dig through dirt searching for happiness I thought I’d found. the darkness scares me more now that I see a chance at light; that flare of hope is pushing me to not give up the fight.

months have gone by, and sometimes I still find saccharine under my fingernails. and I hate myself for hoping that sometimes you do too.

this is not the end of the book. you are right at the heart of it. keep reading.

to the one who will love him next: he’s been through so much. help him. take it slow. smooth the splinters others have left. I’m sure a few of mine are still embedded in his skin.

while you were reading this, someone committed suicide. this page is for them.

four. I pick around my nails when I get nervous. four. you make me nervous. four. you’re bad for my nail beds.

six. I never understood why they called the romantics “hopeless.”

eight. words mean a lot to me. eight. I wish you’d use more of them.

ten. I want to stop picking at my fingers in case you try to hold my hand. ten. I’ve thought about you holding my hand. ten. I want you to hold my hand. ten. I’m scared you’ll try to hold my hand.

but something in the way my feet feel lighter on the pavement when I walk next to you— how your arm brushes mine and sends electricity through my bones (even though I know it’s not scientifically possible)— something in all that makes me second-guess my denial of something outside of the scientifically proven. because maybe, just maybe, you are proof enough.

it’s okay if some things are always out of reach. if you could carry all the stars in the palm of your hand, they wouldn’t be half as breathtaking.

I do not know if this is the end or the beginning or nothing at all. so for now I just inhale, and wait.

lighting a flame is exciting and lovely and warm. you, you are exciting and lovely and warm— but so fleeting. there will never be enough kindling for the both of us.

the happiness will come slowly, the way light filters in through the window in the early morning hours. so slowly you don’t even notice the night is ending, until you wake up and see the sunlight.

I remind myself that poets always have been just people who think too much, who feel too much, who soothe their aches with the only thing that makes sense: words.

but I hope you know sadness is a revolving door. once you’re in it, letting the sadness take you around and around and around, it won’t stop on its own. you’ll just keep going around and around and around. that’s why you need to fight to stop it, fight to stop spinning, fight to get out. get out of that infinite sadness. get yourself out of that goddamn door.

revolving doors feel relentless, but I promise there is an exit,

for the first time, it is scarier to think about going back than to think about moving forward.

completely unaware that when our fingers first touched, it was the big bang all over again. completely unaware of the infinite universe that was just beginning to form between us.

I watched us go up in flames. and all I did was warm my hands in the glow and smile.

you can either make a graveyard or a garden. you can either rot or grow.

sometimes I think we will always come back to each other. not by chance, but by choice. there is no magnetic pull, no right time or right place. the stars are not aligned for us. so we reach our hands up to the night sky and rearrange them ourselves.

I’m made of four dimensions—space and time, heart and soul I am my own universe; infinite and whole my skin is not a boundary, I’m too much to be contained more than person, more than words, I cannot be explained

my mom jokes that I’m picky about psychiatrists, but really, I just wasn’t ready to get better. I wasn’t ready to believe I deserved to be happy.

I am still learning that it is not selfish to let myself become the person I am meant to be.

after years of flood and drought, what a relief it is to see the tide rise and fall again. to bask in blue without being consumed by it. to swim without wanting to drown.

this is not a journey from sad to happy, from bad to good, from total darkness to white light. there is no destination, no ending, no point where I cross the finish line and collect my blue ribbon. I’m learning to live again. I see passion and joy and love where there used to be nothing. but that doesn’t mean I untie my shoes. it just means I have another reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I look at him out of the corner of my eye, past the rim of my glasses. my brain reminds me that I am a silent tornado he does not deserve to get caught up in.

if you think you are drowning, just remember: you float in water.

to my past self: night cannot last forever. the moon is only bright because it’s reflecting the sun. and there is a sun, and you will live to see it. to my future self: day cannot last forever. I know happiness is not a final destination or a resting place. that is okay. it is more than okay.

be grateful that time will heal the wounds but leave the scars. how else will you remember all that you’ve survived?

when I think of love, I think of gravity working both ways. I will not call myself the earth, and you the sun. I do not orbit around you, helplessly falling and spinning around you as the center of my universe. that is not love. love is when I am pulled toward you and you are pulled toward me.

this is me stepping into your gravitational field. not to orbit around you, but with you.