In Shakespeare
People just die if the person they love leaves them.

There's totally something to be said for that.

My love,
I'm not sure I ever said this to you.
I thought you just knew.
I really thought you knew:
I will love you if you change.
However you change.
It will fill me with joy
As long as you let me stay near you.
I will love you if you pack your bags and cut off your hair and go to a country where nobody speaks your language
Just take me with you.
I will love you if you're sick
If you're sad
If you're angry and lost and you lash out.
(I will even love you if you stop loving me.)
When I say there is nothing you could ever do to lose my love
I mean it.
If I can touch you,
If I can't,
If you go out every night,
If you stay in,
If you need to talk,
Or to be silent,
I will love you for the rest of your life and mine.
I thought you knew
That there is nothing I won't try for you
Nowhere I won't go for you
Nothing I won't do for you.
Nothing makes me happier than you.
I would follow you into hell if you'd have me
And you would make it heaven by looking upon it.
I would give up my life, my sanity, my every plan
For a few moments with you,
And you can take these words
And carve them on every sidewalk and
Paint them on every passing car
And even if they last until we are dust
Until nobody even knows what they mean
I will still mean them.
You're my dream. You're why.
For everything. You're what I want at the cost of anything else,
And in case you wonder if I know what I'm saying when I write that, I do
I know
Intimately
Exactly
What that means
And I mean it
More than I've ever meant anything.
This is no love poem.
This is a life poem, an existence poem,
An outpouring of the desire that hums within me for you on every scale
Every level
Every plane.
I choose you, for the rest of time,
Until you send me away, or until we are no more.

I don't know why I love you so much.
That was never the plan.
It isn't safe, to love someone like this
And I always knew it.
But the way your hair curls down your cheeks when you've fallen asleep and it has escaped its pinnings
The way your eyelashes leave shadows down your cheeks
The way your eyes sparkle when you laugh
You hit something so beautiful and painful in my heart.
The way you are,
Everything about the way you are
Just tears me open with love.
When you cry, I long to wrap you in my arms and protect you from every pain you inflict on yourself.
It pulls me toward you, this need to show you with my skin that I belong to you.
Resisting it carves out a huge crater in my chest
As if more and more of me goes to you by the second
But I can't follow it and make myself whole again.
If I do this, if I succeed in these next few weeks,
If you continue to love me
And relearn how to touch me
It will have been the hardest thing I ever did for someone I loved.
If I smile at you and show you how happy you make me
And manage to hide how broken I am,
If I can survive it when you turn away from me in bed,
And pull away from my touches.
I've always said that not reaching for someone I adore
Is an act of unutterable love
And it has never been more true
Because you used to reach back,
You used to crave me like I crave you
Not ***, but closeness, oneness.
I live alone.
I have always lived alone.
And not for a second have I liked it.
I can count on my hands the number of times in my life I've felt at home and whole.
This
What I am doing for you
Trying to do
By giving you all the choice in this
This is the biggest, most difficult thing I have ever given anyone.
And if at the end I lose you
Make no mistake
I will have nothing. I know it. I fear it.
When I woke up this morning the terror of it took my breath away
Because my body knows.
And it won't be losing you that does it,
It will be these weeks,
These weeks and the strength I don't have, the hang on by your fingernails strength I will have to find
In order to keep my head above water and show you why you love me.
By the end of this
I will have used every failsafe I have,
Every life support, every backup plan
I will be stripped raw and naked inside, armorless and starved,
And if you go I will be more unprepared for the agony of losing you
Than I have ever been for any sort of pain.
It is my life I'm giving you, right now,
And it's impossible for you to understand unless you've felt this looming shadow that I live with
But I'm giving you
Every bit of energy I always save to keep myself alive when I am swallowed by the dark.
And I am... so afraid. So inexpressibly, mesmerizing afraid.
I am facing my absolute worst fear every second for all this time,
And it's important that I say that.
Because I've never done it for anyone.
I've never been able to.
And maybe sometimes I'll crack, and you'll see tears, and I'll reach for you.
But I swear to god I'd be less afraid to jump after you off a bridge than to do what I'm doing now.
In ways I would rather die, because it wouldn't take so long with so much fear.
And I have to say this, I have to, because whichever way this turns out
This tops every act of love I have ever done before
And every risk I have ever taken
And every fear I have ever faced.
You are more important to me than I could ever express,
And I love you enough to give you my life,
In every horrible, beautiful sense of the word.

I wanna say
Marry me, you're the one.
I wanna say
I sit up nights missing you.
I wanna say
You make me smile on my worst days, and you don't even know it.
I wanna say
When you're not around for a while I can feel a part of me start to ache.
I wanna say
I don't mind if you get angry about "dumb stuff"
I wanna say
I wish I didn't feel sad when you go out with your friends instead of saying good night.
I wanna say
Thank you for being kind to me when I'm scared and miserable.
I wanna say
I'm glad you're on my skin forever, whether you stay by my side forever or not.
I wanna say
Half of me isn't sad when you're away, and I can't tell if it is trust in you or something else, and it scares me but it also gives me hope.
I wanna say
Please be patient with me, like you've been. I am used to being left and forgotten. I am used to being pushed aside.
I wanna say
Maybe years will undo that. Years with you.
I wanna say
When I am away from you, it is because I have been torn away by my life, and I will always, always come back, as long as you want me to.
I wanna say
If you ever forget me, I forgive you.
I wanna say
When I am lonely like I am right now, it isn't your fault, even when you can fix it.
I wanna say
I feel like I can't ask you to come back because you haven't left, and I feel like I can't ask you to talk more because I couldn't talk for so long when I was busy, but when you're away like this it starts to feel like you don't exist.
I wanna say
In those moments at 3 am when I wonder if you DO exist, that even then you are the best dream I ever had.
I wanna say
I don't know how to speak when I'm not suffering. And I'm not. I'm not even sad. I'm just waiting.
I wanna say
You're worth waiting for.
I wanna say
It's so much easier in person, when I can show you I love you with a touch and feel that you love me when you look at me.
I wanna say I never have doubts like this when we're together.
I wanna say
Just because I worry doesn't mean you're doing something wrong.
I wanna say
I just ******* MISS you.
I wanna say
I'd give anything to have you asleep beside me right now, instead of thousands of miles away.

New world, new life.
This one should be
Colder.
Inside I've stopped
But stopped like a machine with something jammed in the gears
The idea of motion presses on
Grating against itself
Mechanisms I don't understand have stalled
But growl low with their metal fury,
Growing hot.
I am paused, inside,
A picture on a screen, shifting between one second and the next,
Parts of me pixelated and blurry with interrupted action.
It feels, too, like my chest is being filled up with cotton
Packed tight
To keep the gears from grinding in their desperation to restart.
It feels thick.
I am slowly becoming less hollow
And more... muffled.
This feeling
It's wrong
It's dangerous
But I watch it continue and make no move to stop it.
The mechanisms must be protected
Even at the expense of the work to be done.
Until I know if there will be damage
Nothing will move inside of me.

Sometimes, when you are away
I can feel myself shrinking inside.
I don't want it to happen.
I don't like it, or what it means about me.
But it continues anyway.
It's this.... feeling.
Like a flower languishing in a dark closet.
And I hate it.
I don't want to write about it.
I don't want to think about it.
I just want to go to sleep
And only wake up when you're back.
And how useful is that?
But today I slept
18 hours
And I wish I was
Asleep again
And this is why I am hard to love.
I know you being away is not the only reason I feel like this.
I know I feel like this
Because my brain is full of chemicals
Making connections
Which my mind tries to explain.
But on days like this
Days like this that stretch into weeks like this
(Please, not months?)
I reach for you and I wither inside when you are far away
Busy
Distracted
Out
Gone.
Sometimes when you're back
It feels like you're still not
Back.
And so I don't push anymore, on days like this.
But I'm the same person who cried over Skype to you
At Christmastime
Because I needed you to reassure me that you loved me.
It has been so long
And you will get tired of it
And I will still need it.
I still need it.
I still need you.
On days like this I don't tell you anymore
Because you're always so busy
And because I can never tell,
So far away,
If you are going through the motions of loving me.
I let you stay away without telling you it hurts because it would hurt more if you pretended to be here
And maybe that's how it would be, you know?
Maybe you'd be calling it in, talking to me because I begged you to.
And there's never a good time to fall apart on you.
There's never a good time to say that for months I've been feeling sadder and sadder, feeling you slip away because
You feel secure
But you have to know, someday I have to tell you
I don't know what safe means.
And I'm always afraid. It will take
So many years
For me not to be afraid.
And it's not your fault
And it's so much to ask,
But I need you to be here.
And I just...
I wither
When you're not.