"We need to talk". These four words turned my gut into a hamster wheel and spun my mind like a dryer full of bricks. My future ex-girlfriend's knock on the door was morse code for “you failed again”.  

We wielded silence like blades trying to cut away and hoard the few good pieces left of our now failed relationship. But unspoken words are not weapons and vulnerability is not an arms race.

When the hammer finally fell, I felt an odd sensation rush through me. I was visited by a seldom-seen yet beloved patron of my brain I hadn’t seen in months. It was visceral relief like I had just scratched an itch on my face I had been fighting off for 6 months.

Cognitive dissonance is a subtle thing but it was practically slapping me in the face repeatedly until I was confronted with the realization that I have agency in my own life.
They say words create worlds and I have been the architect of my own prison for a long time.

Love has been a wound barely concealed, and intimacy is the bandage that I’ve tried to staunch the bleeding with. But I’ve ripped off my own bandaid so many times the wound has never healed.

It’s an odd dance the mind does when both craving and simultaneously fearing the very same thing. Like burning down your dream home because you got cold in the middle of the night and wanted to warm your fingers around the burning remains of your best intentions.

Every time I say” this one will be different” “I will force myself to be content.” But that works about as well as watering a plant with cheap ***** and wondering why it’s not growing. I've come to terms with my romance delusion. I am self-abandoning myself on an island to merely occupy the space.

“I need to find my better half,” I tell myself, but I severed the better half from myself the second I thought I needed someone to complete me.

I am a rolling snowball of craving, a litany of wants, like a mindless jellyfish dragging its tentacles across the depths of the ocean hoping to feel anything, anything but the dull ache of regret.

Don’t look back. Nostalgia that's nothing more than a dull blade we drag across our wrist vainly hoping that we can use our blood to paint a pastel, a beautiful cosmic rendering of the past we so desperately want back.

The thing is the past isn’t real at least the version in your skull.
The second you surrender control of the moment the cruel machinations of your head immediately start twisting and contorting that memory to be an edge. It's another lockpick for the cage of falsified reality just out of reach

We didn’t envision it would turn out this way but when have expectations ever kept a promise.

Sure life is *****, but brown that’s just a color used to paint masterpieces and isn’t dirt just a reminder of where you came from, that you aren’t god, and someday you will be the dust clinging to another kid's trousers.

So take that dirt in your heart and plant a seed in it while you still can, and maybe you can let it grow this time

Words are the feathers I stuff into my mouth
Sealing the tomb where I buried my best intentions

Like a peacock bereft of its feathers
All fluff and pompousness stripped away

When the truth is laid bare
It turns out I’m just a skinny bird trying to find another mask