these are all confessions and I am the whisky at the bottom of your bottle.
only I never kept you warm and I never filled anyone's empty stomach at two in the morning.
I learned more about you after we stopped looking for ways to find each other.
and how sometimes you can't fix the things that came to you already in pieces.
now even on my peaceful nights I have more doubts than you and I wish I could give you a book filled with all the times I said "I love you" and didn't mean it.
and a map filled with all the places where I said "I love you" and did.
and all I feel is confusion towards you,
not in love and not in hate.
I think this is worse than both.
it's hard to believe that we ever had mornings of hot coffee and smudged makeup.
maybe if it was with someone else I wouldn't constantly watch my coffee lose its warmth and smudge my own makeup with the palms of my hand.
maybe if it was with someone else they wouldn't have felt the need to look for answers in someone else's bed.
it's okay to tell you I found more comfort in someone else's arms than in yours if it's okay for you to not tell me you were spending your nights with someone besides me.
that was never me.
these words mean something but I can't remember who they're for.
if I call it cheating then that would mean it was a game.
if I call this poetry then that would mean we both have a use for manipulation.

things start to make sense as soon as you start feeling like background music instead of the main character in your own life and you'll start staring down at your shoes a lot and watching your phone die without making the effort to charge it again.
you'll feel lonely but never intend on making the effort to speak to anyone and you'll start looking for love in drunk encounters and every corner you can find it but it's not really love it's fake smiles and cold showers afterwards. you'll start to listen to songs that sound like all the apologies you want to tell them and watch sunrises that look like forgiveness.
you start spending a lot of time in busy coffee shops but at empty tables and in bed but never asleep.
and you'll start to realize that they haven't missed you in weeks and your hands started to shake more after they stopped holding them.
you'll begin closing yourself off again and silently apologizing to the next person that tries to love you.
you'll start drinking whenever you're around friends because if you don't they'll ask you why you're so quiet and silence is so much worse than slurred speech filling every gap and unfitting laughs every two minutes. then you realize you're just as needy as you were when you were three and someone had to rub your back to get you to fall asleep and all they had to do was tell you they love you for everything to make sense.

I always find starting things harder than finishing them
because everyone tells me first impressions mean everything
and whenever I introduce myself I almost always begin
by telling people I'm yours.
You could tell me you don't want to see me ever again
and I'd admire you for showing me that I can still survive
even though I've been holding my breath since the last time I saw you.
For a minute there we were one person.  
They say there's a time and place for everything,
but for us the times never changed and we had gone to every place imaginable.
Maybe we should have called it quits the minute you forgot how I take my coffee.
Maybe I should have realized things were different when you stopped spending Sunday's at my house and the "I'll text you when I get home" messages were taking longer to be sent,
as if every time you left the distance you had to travel was farther than before.
Don't tell me I never tried to save us.
Losing you was like listening to your favourite song backwards.
My mother always told me if I wanted something done right then I had to do it myself so I solemnly swear I will always be the one to break my own heart.
I am not sorry that my words always cut you deeper than anything you ever put against your skin.
I am not sorry I forgot you were human and treated you more like a sculpture than a heartbeat.
I am not sorry I made it impossible for you to ever really leave.
I keep trying to tell you that if things were easy
it wouldn't matter how it ends.
But all you can anticipate is it ending
and sometimes I wonder if you only stayed around to watch me try and pick up all the pieces by myself.

I call myself a writer yet I'm awful with words and every time I say sorry it's more like an exit wound than an apology. It's difficult to tell you what I'm feeling when I don't know how to speak and I'll go on talking in my broken languages until you realize you will never understand me. Everyone is telling me I need to stop running away from my problems but I've already tried hiding from them and they'll just keep finding me. I keep thinking that maybe if I smile a little more you'll always be here and I want to **** the thing inside you that makes you leave. I have attachment issues because I remember when I was little and not understanding when people told me they'd "be home later" that they never considered anywhere that I was a home. And maybe I don't want to talk about what you did maybe I want to talk about songs and cities and which direction we're going to walk next and if you want to keep the shirt I'm wearing and if touching each other a certain way is okay and how many buttons you leave open on your flannels and how I'm getting home tonight.