I was not for you. At times I wonder if I am for anyone.

- pardis alia

You cannot force ambition into love.

You are the love you have been waiting for.

- pardis alia

when the oleander blooms. it doesn't know it is poison. its cells. its stem doesn't know it is beauty. it doesn't know that it is delicate and dangerous. a tragedy metastasized from soil. clinging to water. knowing only to grow. but not the soft cut that it will become. people are this way too. fixated on a becoming they do not understand the toxins they are growing on their skin.

- pardis alia.

Every cell in your body is intention animated by you

many people do not crave lovers they desire a meal and silence adoration and complacency they demand love when what they require is a heart for their ego to feed on

When i open my mouth fire comes out

someone else's sins have been impregnated into my shadow because I cannot peel them back from my skin and they follow me everywhere

Sometimes we become so focused on looking for a door that we forget that we are surrounded by windows.

-pardis alia

Will you still love me

When the taps are running

Tears

No water to be found

Will you still love me

When the hearth is cold stone

I am full of smoke

And you cannot keep warm by the fireplace

Will you still love me

When the house we've built

Feels less like a home

Because the walls and limbs I've built it from

Are caught in my own winter

And your lips are parched

And feet are cold

Will you still love me

Will you still sit with me

In this house

When we are too broken to feel like

The home you need

-pardis alia

does your soul. match your eyes. is there always chaos within? I could pull try to pull the truth from your lips but it would bundle and break before hit your esophagus. maybe I am searching for something deep in you that lives on the surface. maybe I'll only ever know how to see you with my eyes.

- pardis alia

I write so often when I am mired in sadness that my lips have forgotten how to curl for speaking of joy.

-pardis alia

There are crueller roads you must travel on the path to paradise. You will get there. Keep walking.

- pardis alia

I fear what they will see when the laughter stops. So I keep them laughing.

-pardis alia

We have built a house together but we do not live in it. We have four walls of memories with lavender coloring and buttercream crown moulding. We have the intimacy of a shower with no curtains and a mirror that blushes fog when we peel our clothes off before it. I am existing here, in different stages of our becoming. But I haven't unpacked my suitcase here. I don't sleep here. I don't kick my feet up, tired from the day and exhale here. I am still on edge. Trying to curate the parts of myself that I can. That are becoming. While we are becoming more this house than what we were before it. How can you pack so much comfort in between your teeth and unleash it in the beam of your smile, while I am still lingering in the gaps? I am afraid of allowing the veneer to shift fully. To let you see the part of the moon that shines away from you and sometimes doesn't. How can I explain the darkness to you when I do not understand why it is there. Or when it will leave. If I fully rest with you, I will carry shadows with us. And you deserve the light. So I leave my suitcase unpacked. I unpluck myself from the couch. I smooth out the grooves my body's made in the bedsheets, dissolve them from memory with a gentle hand. We will close the space between us someday. We will live in the same house, in the same time. When I know I have the light in me to nourish us both from root to lavender's bloom.

- pardis alia.