Maybe dreaming of being somewhere else will get us there,
When those around us are incapable of feeling anything tangible.
Loving with heartbeats.
We wade through pools of doubt,
Seeking the lost that cannot be found.
Who decided unrequited longing was so romantic?
There is no romance in abandon,
Still here I am,
Neglected,
Romanticizing.
Drag your finger down the lines you drew,
Seek meaning where there is none to be sought.
Keep trying to sing lullabies to non-existent people,
Under the bed,
In the closet,
In your mind
You keep moving,
Not quite knowing if the wounds are superficial or extend deep in your being,
Either way,
Bleeding out is the least romantic way to go.
So patch up your wounds with band aids,
You don’t need to watch the blood flow in romanticism of what never was.
Please, never tell me what you really felt.
I’ve been set free from your prison,
I’ve been erased from your list,
Leave me neglected,
Because that’s how I’ve left you.

You walk through long hallways of doubt,
tripping over the things you believed, but shouldn’t have.
Falling through the cracks of a beautiful lie.
You drink in the sweet scent of going too far,
of not being able to turn around;
tracing your fingers down the constellations you drew on the walls,
the ones that predicted your fate.
But now all that is left is a straight line with an abrupt ending.
Brief and beautiful was never what you wanted,
but it also was the furthest thing from what you had.
It was long and painful,
a mosaic of misshaped sentences and remnants of shattered hearts,
pieces of glass you could never quite retrieve from your heels after it all fell to the floor.
Now, you sit in a dark room wishing for someone to save you;
but you have no perception of how you let yourself end up there.
You have no logical way to leave.

My bare feet slap the hard wood and it echoes in my ears the way your words always did,
Ringing, a bit too loud,
Too true.
Too false.
And sometimes, I can convince myself that the dungeon depths of my unbrokenly, broken soul cry out for you,
though they only cry out for the nostalgia you gave to me.
I think I knew,
Even then, that your smile wasn’t mine and your laugh wasn’t lit by the sparks that were made by my too fast beating heart.
And even then,
I think I knew I wasn’t in love with you,
But, god, how I loved to make myself believe that I was.
We were hopeless and in uncharted territory,
And all I wanted was to draw the map that showed forever,
And you wanted to stay lost.
So now my bare feet slap the hardwood and I wonder what it is that keeps my heart so far from everyone else.
It’s too complicated and I’m too tired to keep mourning you after all this time.
You’re still alive and so am I.