If you sit in a hospital room long enough it looks a lot like a funeral home
If you hear a doctor say they don't know what to do anymore enough times it sounds a lot like a mortician asking about the funeral arrangements
When you watch the lines on a heart monitor flutter out of rhythm enough times it feels a lot like your own has stopped beating
When you sit in an ambulance reciting someone's medical history enough times you almost want to beg them to drive slower
As you're standing in the middle of the funeral home you'll realize it's more calming than a hospital room ever could have been
When you hear the sirens and it registers in your mind they can't possibly be coming for her you'll look down and finally see what you've done

How far into the church pew did you dig trying to find the person everyone believes you to be
How many bibles did you burn just trying to ingest something purer than your own soul
How many gallons of holy water did you pour over yourself and into your lungs trying to drown out the memory of her hands
Still to this day when his hands are around your throat you try to convince yourself it's God finally finishing what he started
When you were told God loves all his children they felt the need to add "even you..." at the end and maybe that's why you didn't believe it

I told you I never wanted to kiss anyone else and you looked so confused because you didn't understand the way that your lips were gentle enough to erase the memories of anyone else before you and taint the thoughts of anyone else after you. You didn't understand that kissing you felt like falling off of a building and being held by the hands of God himself all at the same time. You didn't understand that as I kissed you I could feel all of the hurt and pain you had ever experienced because it was so evident just from the way you kissed me like your life depended on it and that if that kiss didn't take my breath away your life would never feel complete and that if I wasn't sitting there with my fingertips brushing over my lips days, weeks, months, years, after the fact remembering the way it felt that you hadn't done it good enough and you would keep trying until you did but all of those times I told you to kiss me again so I could remember it for the rest of my life I was lying purely to get to feel you again because I could never forget the way you slipped inside of my soul and patched all of the tears in my heart all while just barely brushing your perfectly beautiful lips against mine that were cracked from crying. I could never forget the way your moans settled in my stomach like sugar cubes settling in a cup of tea in the morning or the way your words sounded more poetic than I could ever imagine for my own to sound. I could never forget that and here I am months later sitting with my fingertips brushing against my lips and goosebumps rising on my skin remembering the way you kissed me that last time and how I will spend the rest of my life trying to duplicate that with someone else. C.a.l

Do you remember when you were little,
how your parents would give you jigsaw puzzles just to occupy your time.
You'd open the box and it would smell like cardboard and paint and there would be dust sitting in the corners after you dumped all the pieces out.
I always started with the edges first.
Work along the outside and get a boarder, then fill it in.
But it seemed inevitable that at some point
You'd lose a piece
You would get to the end and search the whole house
Under pillows, under beds, in cabinets, everywhere
You couldn't find it
Eventually you'd give up and go eat dinner
But months later, it would turn up
In the same spot you know you had already looked
It would be there
Waiting for you
It's kind of funny really because now, years later, nothing's changed
You go to school and you're given a box
Filled with college applications and marriage and kids and adventures and getting arrested on that back road and falling in love with that person
You dump it all out and they give you until you graduate to sort it out
What do you want to be
Who do you want to be with
Where do you want to do it
Put it all together by the time you graduate
Get a plan
So you start with the edges
Graduate, go to this school and major in this degree
Move to this city, get this job, make this much money
But once you get the edges built you start filling it in
You fall in love with a boy who drinks too much and smokes unfiltered cigarettes
You sit on rooftops with him and you love him, God do you love him
Eventually you tell him you've got to finish the puzzle and you push him to the side
You fill in all the rest of the middle
Husband, kids, raises at work, vacations, red wine that you secretly hate, all of it
Eventually though you get to the end
The last piece
The piece that has happiness scribbled on the back in a blue ink pen
And you can't ******* find it
You look in your home and in your children and in your husbands wedding vows and it's just not there
Life goes on, you sleep in a different room and pretend to still be in love
For the kids sake of course
But one day you're going to be standing in a coffee shop
The same coffee shop you know you already looked in
And he's going to walk into you
Spill his drink down your blouse and murmur that he's still in love with you while you discuss the weather
You're going to find that puzzle piece
Just try to find it before you lose patience and cut something else to fit in its place.
C.a.l

The bottom line is I'm always the one stuck apologizing. There's this thing inside of me that thinks you can do no wrong to the point that when you're standing over me with blood on your hands staring at the knife in my chest I will look up at you and apologize for ruining your favorite white shirt and staining your skin. When you're holding me deep in the icy cold water and I'm gasping for breath only to fill my lungs with ice chips I will shake my head and wonder why the hell I didn't think to wear warmer clothes. And of course, when you tell me you don't love me anymore I won't believe for a second it's because of the demons inside your own head or that you're intentionally saying it to rip my heart into irreparable pieces I will convince myself with every fiber of my being that it's because I'm just not what you need. I didn't hug tight enough or wipe your tears away in the right way or buy the right kind of flowers on your birthday and I especially didn't let you in to my mind and body and soul enough. I constantly did my best to push you away and I guess ultimately I did but it doesn't seem I did  it soon enough because now you're laughing at me as I'm on my knees in front of you begging you to take me back and in between mumbled "I love you's" I'm apologizing  yet again only this time I can't seem to find a way to put into words why it's my fault and not yours because maybe, for once, you're wrong. Maybe you ****** up this time. But I think we both know that I could never admit that or make myself believe it but while I try I'll stay here on my knees begging for forgiveness for all of your mistakes. C.a.l

His voice is an endless line of I love you's mixed with an even longer line of I can't love you's. It tears you apart with a single word because it holds more secrets behind each syllable than most people hold in their entire body and you become so focused on peeling back the meaning behind each word that you can no longer string them together in your own mind to form a coherent sentence so when you ask him to repeat himself he assumes you weren't listening when realistically you were listening up until he got to the words love and hate right next to one another and his voice shook just the tiniest bit and you spent the rest of the time trying to pick apart why something so small could affect him that much and why had no one ever healed the pain behind those words for him because when he speaks you can't help but feel as if you're in the eye of a hurricane surrounded by rushing winds and pouring rain on every side of you but where you stand with him is calm and silent all except for his words falling into your soul and settling in your heart so deep that you will never be able to hear another person tell you Goodmorning without comparing the raspiness in their voice to the smooth calmness of his and no matter how many strangers beds you stay in with the ability to lie and tell them you love them but not being able to even say their name when you wake up tangled in their sheets you'll remember the way they fell asleep the night before after a simple goodnight and how he would have spent hours upon hours just talking to you and muttering about how your eyes are brighter than the sun itself until you fell asleep because he knows you can't fall asleep to silence and no matter how much you pretend you never heard him speak or called him just to listen to him say your name over and over again his voice will always be settled somewhere deep in your heart scarring the path that any other voice you come into contact with will travel across. C.a.l

Logically, I know after you left you were fine. I know that you didn't spend the next six months trying to learn how to function again without me, but a small part of me hopes that you did. A part of me hopes more than anything that you spent hours remembering the way your name sounded falling from my lips and how your eyes looked reflected into mine. I hope that you stayed up at all hours of the night clawing at your own soul attempting to find who you were without traces of me being left behind. That every time you heard that song and felt the urge to sing in the car with you windows down your throat burned worse than if you had downed an entire bottle of *****. When she held your hand it felt like razor blades and when she kissed you is felt like you were swallowing shards of glass. I hope you felt things you weren't able to control and I hope you weren't able to lay wrapped in her duvet listening to her talk about a future with you because all you could here was my name blaring over a loud speaker in your mind. I hope for her sake she didn't get the chance to fall in love with you, that you left to come searching for me before she had the time. And I ******* hope more than anything that you experienced half of the pain I did the day you told me you never really loved me. That when you came home last night and I was in his arms and you saw that I finally found another person who could calm my nightmares, that it felt like I was ripping your heart and soul out all in one go and throwing them off the same cliff we went diving off of on our first date.

I also hope you realize that none of this is true. I want to see you smile again, desperately. Even if the next time I see it as on your wedding day when you're handing your love to another, I will not be able to properly breathe without seeing your eyes light up with love again. I hope you realize that no matter how many times you see me wrapped in his arms and I scream i hate you off the rooftops that you will remember the way my lips were afraid to touch yours the first time because I was and still am so ******* in love with you. C.a.l