I tell him about the 90 year old that made a home in my body.
Say "I feel more than the nineteen years, I feel more than your nineteen years."
He takes it as evidence towards what he calls my "superiority complex"
makes a joke about thinking I'm so much wiser than everybody else as I stammer with arms crossed trying to find the words my nineteen year old vocabulary does not know.

This has nothing to do with being wise you sonofabitch, its about an exhaustion that paints the dark color around my eyes and the sigh that lives in my belly you ******.

He interrupts, laughing "What do you mean? Your bones ache or something? haha hahaha." Loud, obnoxious, not the first time,
not the last. I want to say yes

yes
yes they ache ad they creak
and they burn and so do my eyes and so do my insides and so do the words I say and the way I say them and the way it scares others when I say some profound ****, I almost sound like Gandhi, like Bukowski, I just never learnt of a beautiful way to disguise my pain. Not enough so It could sell.


I was better off alone when the ice made a security blanket around my heart-better off with no pain.
He shines a mirror on all my missing parts, calls me ****** up.
Stand next to me just to lean over in his height, superiority complex runs high among privileged nineteen year old straight males.

The ice thawed but he came with no gloves
I found the bruising less tolerable than the cold this time around
Less bearable than the lonely beat my heart learned to sing.
Its the same story he just repeats himself as another boy who says the wrong things and makes me feel
exhausted for every having opened up my icebox full of secrets.
Every conversation is an emptying out and not the cathartic kind.
The kind that leaves the ninety year old in me shaking with nothing left inside her but rotting gums and eyes that have seen too much ****. Nobody is supposed to make you this unhappy. This is not what I asked when I asked for you to make me feel something.
Every time I say your name Matthew, it almost comes out Nathan, in my head. Nathan with his accent, and the same humor, same jokes. Nathan the boy I emptied myself out to just so he could leave bruises on the uncovered parts. It was so easy to to leave somebody I never gave a **** about.

Matthew, I only say your name so often so I remember it, so I say it right, so I remind myself you are not the same person. Matthew sounds allot like Nathan when your drunk or sad which I am most of the time these days, you sound allot like him with your laugh, sound like your gonna leave bruises on all the parts I lift up to show you. I know this.

This is a fact. Like I know I wont ever cry for you until I'm all thawed out.
Matthew, for  your painstaking insensitivity, for your lack of understanding
Matthew for you not understanding all the creaking in my bones is just screaming

Save me
Fix me

Give me one reason why you're good for me because I cannot think of any and
*I so desperately want to

my mother is yelling to herself in her bedroom
as my father complains about a mess but creates a bigger one
creates a mess by breaking things
(sometimes breaking spirits)