Wordsmith Wednesday: Love Me or Leave Me Whole

By: Violet McCleod, Sophie Lorraine Smith, and Starcandyxoxo

Some kinds of love ask you to disappear. To fold your edges in, lower your voice, rewrite your wants until they’re easier to swallow. But there’s another kind—rarer, quieter—that meets you where you are and says, don’t change a thing. That’s the kind we wait for. The kind that sees us whole and doesn’t flinch.

This week’s Wordsmith Wednesday features two poems in conversation. One is all hungry charm and risk: it asks if love could survive the fallout of wanting too much. The other is a declaration, sharp and unwavering: I will not be hollowed out to make room for someone else. Together, they hold the tension between longing and boundary—between reaching out and standing your ground.

This is a love story, in a way. But not the kind that ends with compromise. This is the kind that says: take me as I am. Or don’t take me at all.

Untitled
by Starcandyxoxo

If I arrived in the dead of night, prying open windows, all shadows and slippery hands. If I waltzed in a ballroom, took your hand in mine, just to whisper in your ear everything I want. If I said you are everything, would your heart flutter. If my heart had enough mercy to heal instead of hurt, would you say yes? If I stole you, would you protest? Would the glittery, hazy dream fall away and leave us in a hollow abyss?

And I would take your hands in mine, I’d tell you to keep calm. Sly grins and rolled eyes. And the city would change from mine to our’s, I’d walk you down hidden alleyways and find a hole in the wall arcade. And everything I’d steal would become worthless. We could find new stories, hidden routes, end the game when we needed a new save.

If I stole you, would the stars in your eyes turn to molten love? Would they cool into ash?

And then I could come back in your late night shift with every mercy I possess, piece it back together, and hope that I’m just as charming when I give as when I take.

Confessions of an Ace Lesbian
by Sophie Lorraine Smith

I am
a perpetual stranger.

I’ve stopped looking for
the taste of rejection-
because that’s all I ever found.

Who dreams of me anyway?

After all,
I long for something alien:
a hand to hold,
a voice to talk to late into the night,
a steady warmth beside me.

I won’t have a woman who sees my body as a mine in the earth-
the true value lying underneath.
I will not let her take a shovel to me.
I will not be torn apart for another’s wants.

This conviction, I admit, leaves me lonely,
but I did decide
that I’d rather be lonely and whole
than shut down my heart and let my veins be dug dry,
every piece of me taken away,
tarnished by tight hands,
kept in a cabinet as a trophy.

If only you were different, a voice in my head laments. If only you were like everybody else. If only you loved the sound of shovels.
Ha. Like I haven’t heard that before. 
Like when I was a little kid who was better at books than people,
or a girl who couldn’t help but feel like she was failing at her gender,
or a teenager who just couldn’t find any boys to like.
That’s a lesson that I should have learned by now.
I am who I am.
No getting around that.
No wishing myself away.
In the end, it’s pointless.

So I’ll just stand here, lonely, somewhere up high
where only the wind and sun may rest on my shoulders
and I will be a lighthouse
flashing my message:

I am
a perpetual stranger.

I could not compromise 
who I am.

Are there any other
strangers out there?

Anyone else who chooses nothing rather than something false?
Who tires of those two choices?

Come find me
if you yearn for something quiet and small and true.
If you long
for a hand to hold,
a voice to talk to,
a steady warmth
beside you.

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