The sadness creeps beneath my skin.
Shards of glass in my veins.
The unending grey seeps in through my pores.
Consuming me slowly.

A shrill sound with no reprieve.
The shouting behind my eyes.
My psyche tears like the fiber of meat.
Ripping ragged edges.
Deterioration.

Memories like fabric.
Ripples like silk.
Unlocking sealed vaults.
Excavating the contents.
A landslide.

Immense pain.
Like a fork against your molars.
A pinging sensation.
A jolt to wake you in the night.

Theres no reprieve from the ache.
The feeling of being crushed.
A rubber band around your ribs.
Your bones beg.
Crack.

Bone marrow replaced with sadness.
Too much to contain.
Pressure against the confines bone.
Snapping in two at any second.

Any bit of intelligence has been ruined.
I'm strung out in my sadness.
All thoughts are electric current.
Unharnessed.

An itchy soul.
Yearning for space.
Desperate.
Waiting for the skin to split.

Fire beginning in your fingers.
Flames licking your lungs.
The underside of your muscles burn.
Swallowed whole.

Pressure against my skull.
Fluid and mass.
The seams may split.
Spilling out.
Boiling over.

Needing peace like water.
High noon in summer.
Your throat betraying you.
Begging to quench it's thirst.

Slamming my fists against the ground.
Pulverizing the flesh of my knuckles.
Screaming into the darkness.
Praying to the gods.
Begging for mercy.

Midnight.
Darkness.
The soft yellow light that barely pierces our blinds from the street lamp below.

My senses heighten with each passing second.

I begin to hear the rhythm of your breath. The pound of your heart. The softness of you pulling me closer, even in slumber.

My imagination takes hold.

You are a song.

You are a song without lyrics.
For the most beautiful of symphonies have no words.
You, my love, are a symphony.
Majors and minors.
Strings.
Wind.
Perfection.

Your breath on my shoulder; the melody.
Your heart's rhythm against my breast; the bass.
Your sleepsweet mumbling; the harmony.

Your hand upon my hip.
Our legs intertwined.
We move closer and closer as your song plays on.
Softly.
Sweetly.

I can feel the love on your skin.
Sinking into me.
Traveling deep in my veins.
Filling my breast.
Warming my ribs.

My sweet symphony.

Moments pass.
Fleeing into the darkness that is our concept of time.
Fleeting moments.
The passing of time.

I love you, she says.
She speaks with certainty.
A certainty laced with darkness and ice.
A chill against her ribs.
She's not enough.

I need reasons, he says.
He speaks with a need for understanding.
Needing to understand how she could be so cold.
He fears she'll change her mind.

She blinks back the tears.
The words freeze in her throat.
Thousands of hornets in her brain.

He stares at her face.
Wondering what she's thinking.
Something he just can't figure out.

She tries to articulate reasons.
Trying to describe her certainty.

He fights to stay calm.
Surrounded by her destruction.

She believes in logic.
Meanings.
Choices.

He believes in numbers.
Reason.
Fate.

She squeezes her thoughts into simple sentences that she cannot get past her teeth.
Choose your moments.
Choose your meanings.
Nothing is certain unless you choose for it to be certain.
This time she has the easiest choice.
She feels it in her gut.
Deep in her bones.
He is her future.
He is her greatest desire.

She's overthinking.
Searching for pretty words.
Floral sentences.

She will choose him.
Every time she will choose him.
A thousand times over.
Without the blink of an eye.
She will always choose him.

She knows this.
She's made her choice.
She is certain.

She sees her future with him.
Children with dark hair and honey eyes.
Soft grass beneath their bare feet as they dance around in endless summer.
She burns with the desire to take his name.

He didn't leave her.
He decided to stay.
He chose her.

She left a wake of destruction.
A minefield of betrayal.

He stayed out of his love.

She can't imagine someone loving her that much.
Enough to stay through her explosions.
To love her in the wreckage.

She never believed that someone could make her want to breathe.
That someone could make her want to wake up in the morning.

He is her reason for keeping the blood within the confines of her veins.

She knows that he is the one who will stand beside her for always.

She trusts him.
She doesn't show it.
But she's learning.
Trying.
She's fighting for it.

She will learn to let him in.
She will learn to let him truly love her.
She will learn how to be part of a whole.

With him by her side, she can conquer.
They will conquer.
Together.
As one.

He is still waiting.
Patiently.
Waiting for an answer to depart from her lungs.
She loves his patience.
She values his time.

She writes this in silence.
In hopes that he will soon understand her reasons.
Her choices.

She will keep trying.
Until there's nothing left to be said.
Until her vocabulary is exhausted.
She will continue to prove this love she has for him.

He is her home.
He is her future.
The father of her children.
The husband she waits for.

He is her heart

"I'm okay."
"I'm okay."
"I'm okay."

Simple words.
As you say them over and over the syllables begin to distort.
They begin to dance lucidly through the white noise that fills my skull.

The words twist and drip through my teeth.
They slip past my lips like wine.
They fall upon hungry ears; ravenous for reason.

I am left alone with my static.
My silence.
Amongst cold coffee and soured cream.

My skin is goosebumps.
The tingle of the thunder's crack.
The caress of the mountain breeze.
The exhale of a lover against the base of your spine.

I cling to you like an island.
My bones, glass, beneath my skin.
Shifting.
My muscles turning from flesh to ash.
Crumbling underneath.
My body feels foreign.
No longer mine.

You hold me like a lost child.
A lost child who's family died long ago.
As if the love in my soul is the last of a spring almost dry.
The drips from your tap.

I am your last project.
Your last carrier dove.
You are my home now.
I will dig roots beneath your feet.
Roots deep enough to find the warmth in winter.
Strong enough to withstand the test of time.

A passion for you courses through my veins.
Kerosine on the embers that my heart once was.
A desire uncontainable.
A love unimaginable.

We are as strong as the Appalachian mountains.
The purist of waters.
The sweetest of honey.

These are the dreams that dance among the static.
In between the broken syllables and the lies on my lips.

But no, really. I'm okay.

"I'm feeling so small. It was over my head, I know nothing at all."

My skin is made of paper.
My bones are shards of glass.
My blood is shifting in my skin.
Staining the edges of once white youth.
Once unmarred slates.

Now I am a shamble.
My structure cracked.
My spirit broken.

My lungs are filled with dust.
My heart is pumping nothing.

If I have no will,
please let me be.

Don't make me stay.
Please don't make me.

I don't want this anymore.

We sit in silence.
Blue and gray shadows dance upon our walls.
******* TV.

We sit with our feet touching.
But we are miles apart.
How did we get here?
I always ask the same question.
How did we ******* get here?

We have had love.
We have had such good times.
Unimaginably good times.
Waves of laughter.
Kisses with no end.
Holding hands in parking lots.

Now I feel that you don't even want to touch me.
I feel that you have no reason to love me.
I don't understand.

I want your love.
I want your touch.
I want your skin upon mine.
I want to make up.
I want to make love.

These things, I fear, will never happen.

We fight.
We ****.

How much longer can one heart sustain this?
How much desolation can ones bones bear?

I hear the rain upon the rooftop.
I hear the trees cracking outside.
I hear my insanity screaming inside my head.
It's a deafening silence.

My skin is on fire.
Too tight.
My blood is hot and thick inside my veins.
It needs escape.

I need to see red.
I need a razor.

I'm drowning in a sea of my own blood.
Choking on my teeth.

I smoke cigarettes to deaden the taste of you against my teeth.
You are.
You will be.
You were the only one.

The bile rises up into my throat like swords slicing the flesh of innocent men.
The rage contaned in me is that of a cannon in the breeze.

I am light.

You are dead.

I loved you with passion.
Red roses.
Satin sheets.
A racing heart.
And a jealous mind.

You slipped through my fingers like hot wax in icewater.
Your name tears my muscles and breaks my bones.

Showers made me feel clean.
Now I'm covered in oil.
I'm drenched in the feeling of your sweat against mine.
The sound of your breath in my ear shatters my reality.
It throws my mind back into a cyclone filled with pretty things you said.
And all of the lies that dripped out from between your lips.

I thought you cared..
I thought we meant something.

We were nothing greater than myself.

We were nothing greater than the air we breathed.
And the wars we set inside ourselves.