is it worse to cry
until your eye
bags sit above the cheekbone,
your sleeves are soaked
with salt,
and you feel an overwhelming sense of
everything all at once, left finally with
aggressive emptiness

or to sit alone in the dark
with a full head
tissues in hand
knot in the gut
broken chest bone
waiting for the tears to come,
but they don't?

thank you.

thank you for convincing me i had the world.
thank you for playing with my hair only after i styled it the way you like it.
thank you for holding me while i cooked our dinner,
and only letting me eat a quarter of what you did,
because my "voluntary" starvation turns you on.
thank you for touching me so gently,
gently enough that i thought it meant something,
and for showing me a constructed version of your heart.

thank you
for breaking my trust almost as much as you broke me,
for showing me that your needs mean more to you than mine ever did,
and for showing me that the sick satisfaction of knowing you could make me lose myself was more important to you than the fragility of my abandoned soul.

thank you
for testing the elasticity of my heart
and the bandwidth of my patience,
for showing me i deserve more than a man who uses manipulation
to hide his undeniable self hatred,
and for letting me build you up so high above this Earth that gravity would carry you
and you'd never have to fall back down and see what you left.

thank you
for showing me every single thing I don't want.

and when someone comes along and loves me in a way that you never could,
i hope you look down and see me shining brighter than every star in the atmosphere i lifted you up to.

tell me how
the most broken
beaten down
torn up
stripped to the flesh
people

could ever get back up
brush off the dirt
and carry on
like nothing ever
happened.