It was the flash of colors,
Your eyes covered in the hair you hated so much.
Reds,
Blues,
Oranges,
Pinks.
Colors mushed together to find what made your heart beat out of your chest.
Blurry,
Blurry pictures of you.
Like you were always out of reach to me.

When we first met I’d write you love notes
Leave them scattered around your room.
When we first met I would stay up all night laughing, not yet tired from the lack of sleep.
When we first met every time you kissed me I could feel that you loved me then.
That was what seems like forever ago.

He asked her this one question.

She, beside him, curled up in her small frame. Knees tucked to her chest, pink lips, and coffee stained teeth, she smiled small.

"I've been asked this question by many," she says, "And I've always said things like someone's voice, or the way they held me. Maybe it was their laugh or the way my heart ached when I smelled their t-shirts at night.
You, though, will always leave me with an unanswered question.
I don't know why I love you but for some reason, my heart will whisper your name when I'm too intimate with a bottle pressed to my lips.
When the tears I cry are warm from the sound of your voice when it pours through the videos we've laughed in.
I don't think I love you but my heart does. Maybe that's why my mind cannot think of any reasons because you lie in my chest where it aches the most."

The past is a rundown motel that hasn’t had any visitors in a while but yet you try and stay.
You know the walls are molding and the ceiling has long since caved in but here you are
Residing in a bed with the springs pricking all over your body,
Numbing you to reality.
You cling on to when the room smelled of fresh paint and it wasn’t so dark.
In fact, you can even almost see the sun peeking through the window as if it was yesterday.
But yesterday,
Was many years ago.
The rust,
The damp air,
The rot,
It takes over Yesterday.
Overgrown weeds and musk cover the floor,
Yet,
You still walk barefoot as if it was the carpet that was once there.
You checked in to this marvelous moment not even thinking it could turn into a place.
A place that you began to frequently visit even if the people that lived with you there have no longer occupied the space since,
Well,
Yesterday, it seems.
You sink lower into those springs,
Unaware of your broken bones and puncture wounds because you decided to live in that moment,
Instead of walking out the door at the first sign of flickering lights.
When you knew,
Deep down,
Staying wasn’t an option,
But revisiting became a habit.
Only if it was Yesterday.

Listen to me,
My love,
listen to me.
The urgent call of your name rings through the air,
Like a warning bell being sound off.
Loathe the way you wash over my body,
Consuming the dark corners of self indulgence,
As if you know the culling sways my every move.
If you knew the damage,
The turmoil,
The rot in my brain,
That spreads the more I touch you,
The more I breathe you in,
Poison in the warning bells.
I sink lower into these depths,
How I will rise,
I do not know.
But it begins with engaging with my pain
As motive.
I begin here,
Forfeiting my life to the self indulgence I've denied myself.