Your touch disgusts me.

As your gentle hand runs over the raised skin on mine, it reminds me of the poison you call love.

Every rustle could disturb you, every thing out of place in a placeless home could set you of, every success was a failure and every mistake a disaster;

your eyes lost their luster, your face turned sour and your sweet voice would turn into a nightmarish howl.

Your teeth would grind as you raised your palm and before each blow drops of your poison would echo through the walls.

As my little body was contaminated with the colors of your love, my mind became a product of the poison you spat.

Love became violence and I became a work of art as your poison spread through my mind.

I replaced your blues with my reds and whites in the name of self-love.

Mirrors became daunting when the only reflection I could see was the one your eyes projected, the reflection of yet another misplaced thing of your dollhouse fantasy; yet another failure, yet another disastrous creation.

As you became the last prisoner of the shackles of your poison, your carefully constructed fantasy began to crumble and crack.

As you watched the walls fall, the strange silence indicated that you were now alone in the ruins of an empty nest, longing for our presence, our imperfection, our brokenness, our noise.

Your touch disgusts me.

Your absence is loud.

Your image is woven so deeply, no matter how hard I try the blissful picture is impossible to unbind; embroidered even to the traces lost with time.

With nothing left, no stone unturned, no landscape, or tree, or bird, your face is engraved in each and every turn.

Your name, though left unspoken, quietly slips between the silences in my words as if not a moment of quiet was ever avowed.

I dare not step outside the self-imposed boundaries of my own recollections as my eyes keep failing to follow your fading gray tracks imprinted on my flesh.

When the stuttering in my head finally quiets down and I dare think that the immutable might fade, I’m left with a pause before the voices come around.

Seemingly in distance, echoes of the moons, stars and oceans across each universe mock the perishing of my last wish, as they remain intact and eternal.

And while their sneers drifts through the galaxy, something stirs in the depths of me; a quiet tremor, a shift unseen, an ember burning where silence had been.

As I cross the boundary, as I end the quiet, with nothing left, I beg the universe to hear me out. But the stars do not answer, only flicker in indifference.

And in their stillness I come to see that no hand will reach out to set me free.

The weight is mine, the path my own, to shape this fate, to let you know.

All else aside, my new wish has formed with only this, may the sun shine brighter with each new dawn.