I write you, because the absence of you is still somehow shaped like your presence.

I write you because you overwhelm, overwhelmed my defences and now that my house is underwater there is only air that is not you in the top corner of the attic.

I drift along on the current of you I’ve created, fallen prey to, and wonder if it will ever end.

Or lessen. Abate.

I could let the air leave my lungs and sink down into you as long as I knew that in the water you were wrapped back around me as I was wrapping myself around you.

I drown in your tide and pray that your fire begins to burn less brightly, no longer a flashover combustion but something that lingers long and warm and comforting.

Instead I will macerate away, fasting on air-fulls of you I am convinced are whole meals, and you will fall victim to my incendiary blaze as I go out in nothing akin to glory, and we’ll both stand on opposite sides of a road as we bleed and stare back at each other.

This will only hurt, but the swell of you I sail forth on, carrying in my veins with every waterlogged step, means I can’t stop.

I don’t want to.

If I hated you like you think I hate you, you’d be dead.

If I hated you as you think your lungs would cease to inflate, your heart would slow, the blood in your veins icing slowly until it stood still.

If I hated you like you think I hate you, my thoughts would bury you alive, grains of sand tickling against your nose one by one until they came faster and faster still and became an avalanche.

If I hated you how you’re telling everyone I do, faceless men would dog you down dark streets, as you looked over your shoulder, as they slowly closed in, as you realised you weren’t paranoid, as sharp metal flashed in a single glint of moonlight, as your life seeped out onto the street, as you died alone.

If I hated you like you think I hate you, my skin would peel from my body, burnt away by the powerful emotion unable to be contained inside, raw muscles moving and exposed beneath the sun, skeletal sinewy fingers still grasping for you.

If I hated you like you wished I hate you, you’d actually matter to me.

There is you, there is you, there is you.

Fear and affection for you fighting a war for dominance that seems to bear no chance of being lost.

Lightness that takes root somewhere along my spine and makes standing easier, more like floating.

I am wary, shadows in corners, but they are of the future, and you are too full in the present for me to fall off the edge of the world, the swell of your horizon blue and limitless.

In this moment, this one, this one, this one

I want to dissolve into you, little else close enough when you beat like hope in the winged eaves of my heart, trapped, both trapped.

I like you so much it *****.