You were young, And you were searching, even then. But you were trying to make homes out of temporary people. Trying to find yourself in the body of a stranger who could never fill you, never complete you, never satisfy the longing in your chest to be both protected and set free, both loved and let…
Catalog
Marisa Donnelly
Marisa Donnelly graduated Summa Cum Laude from Waldorf University in May 2015 with a B.S. in Secondary English Education, a B.A. in English, and a B.A. in Creative Writing with endorsements in Secondary Reading and Coaching. She is a Midwest-born, West Coast-based writer, poet, essayist and licensed teacher working as a full-time Staff Writer and Editor/Producer for Thought & Expression Co.
Long and liquid words like wounds reopening, spilling blood across the surface of each page. I wrote every secret, every hope, every wish, confessing how my lips still long to be kissed by yours.
I can close my eyes and still remember the way the earth smelled like gravel and sunburnt skin, the cheap gas-station vodka burning my throat, a boy’s hand on the small of my back, the black, black sky watching my every move.
Whenever I was dizzy and drunk on freedom and loneliness I would look up to right myself again. And the sky, those roads, these stars would guide my tired heart home.
I tried to kiss away the emptiness screaming ‘I love you’ into the spaces as if I could fill him, us. He was my first experience with transience— searching for a residence in the impermanent.
He kissed me, and I thought of all the names of the constellations, all the patterns I had yet to trace, all the world I had yet to feel underneath my feet.
The roads called at night, always long and lonesome and winding. She always drove with one hand on the wheel, the windows rolled down, the gas pressed just a little too far. This was her way of running when her legs couldn’t carry her fast enough.
You and I were never meant to last too many elbows, too much skin two bodies intertwined in beds but never dreams.
The highway slipped past our quiet tires, streetlights specks in the distance. I lost all sense of time, out of place from my suburban town, seeking solace in our silence. As we drove on, I watched the stars their quiet elegance magical, twinkling, unafraid. And on that unfamiliar highway I didn’t…
I was dizzy in love with the idea of love so much so I expected boys who were not men to chase me when what I really wanted was to chase everything that didn’t taste like home.
I should have known your kiss would taste like rebellion. I should have known those lips would hurt and heal.
Maybe our bodies are just hearts with legs and that’s why we’re so quick to run.
I kissed and kissed until I could almost forget how restless I’d become.
Only when the sun goes down do we allow ourselves to dream to imagine our hips swaying in the moonlight of another city, another town, hands held by a stranger who will soon steal a piece of our soul under that dark sky.
I wanted to lay in a field of grass and let the sky swallow me whole. I wanted anywhere but here. I wanted more. I wanted more.
Maybe you leave because you long to know. Maybe you leave not because of longing but because you must. Or maybe you leave simply to find the answers you’ve held inside of you all along.