you tell me i'm your best friend but sometimes i feel more like a laundry line

you hang your emotions on me like clothes, swinging back and forth from happy to sad and back again like steady wind

i hold you up with clothespins, stretching myself thin, tying myself to cast iron hooks to make sure you don't fall and get yourself soiled in the muddy dirt or the wet grass

you tell me i'm your best friend as if it makes everything clean, as if the things you say hurt you don't hurt me too

i listen to you tell me everything wrong in your life and i feel myself getting heavier, like instead of drying in the breeze, there's a sudden downpour and the clothes are once again dripping wet

you don't understand that i am frightened that every last word you say to me might be the last and if you leave, who will i be? i'll be a line without clothes, like a skeleton of what i could be. i would be a shell of a best friend, someone who once was who might never be again.

i am afraid that someday you will give me a piece of clothes that i cannot handle. you will give me a shirt so drenched and sopping wet that my twisted line of rope and flimsy wooden clips won't be able to hold it and we will both tumble down together with one gust of terrible wind

they say don't bite the hand that feeds you, and yet you run at me like a ravaged animal. you are never direct and yet every bad word you say against me hits in a precise way, like the blow of a punch only five minutes after your fist comes in contact with my face.

"difficult," was the word you used. "you are so difficult." was what you said to me when you knew it hurt, when you knew i couldn't cope with the thought of being a burden to even the flies. you called me difficult when i had every right to be as difficult as i wanted to be because this was my story, my secret, my reason for fear and yet you made it sound so simple, so easy, and so yours.

it was not yours to tell. it will never be yours to tell but you still act as if you will. you won't purposefully, but still sometimes i am afraid the wrong choice of words will come out of your mouth at the wrong volume and every human being in the world will know what i so desperately want to stay mine.

you tell me i'm your best friend but i feel more like your laundry line.