I'm breathing.
That's all I've been doing lately.
Sometimes it's hard to get my next breath to reach my lungs.
That's usually when your name flashes through my head. Or her name. Or the fact that you left so easily. So fast.
I wish this hurt you, too.
And I always try to stop myself when my mind wanders there because I love you.
God I love you.
But I just wanna know that this isn't just hard for me. I wanna know that somewhere you're thinking about me. Somewhere my name flashes through your head and it becomes difficult for your next breath to reach your lungs.
I just wanna know.
Because lately I've been feeling kind of abandoned and it's funny because when you start to believe that maybe people don't always leave, they leave.
And I never thought you'd leave.
But you did.
And I stayed.
And I'm stuck.
I'm stuck on the way you breathe when you're sleeping and how cute your voice is when you first wake up. I'm stuck on the feeling I got when you said you loved me and the way we argued a lot but you never let me go to sleep feeling like you weren't in love with me.
God I love you.
And this is so hard.
This hurts so ******* much.
But I'd take all the pain in the world just to see you happy.
I'll watch you love someone else if that'll make you happy.
All I want is to hear you say I made you happy.
I wish you would come back to me.
I love you.

I have felt silence like boulders against my chest. It is not words that affect us, it is the lack thereof. I mean we can listen to someone who doesn't love us tell us that they do, and we can listen to someone who hates us tell us that they don't, but at the end of the day it is not those regurgitated thoughts that keep us awake at night; no it is the thoughts that remain thoughts and never turn themselves into words. Silence is heavy. It is so heavy that the breathing of an impassioned lover who has lost all passion speaks louder than the words they utter. It is so heavy that you can hear hearts break behind the thinness of paper hospital walls; you can hear the breaking of sternums and ribcages as caskets are lowered in the thinness of paper ground. He can lay beside you at night and whisper in your ear sweet nothings about how you are his and he is yours when you both know he's silently whispering to the owner of that lipstick on his collar, but the silence of his dreams are what made you open that wine bottle. The silence of his "I have to work late" made you not want to put it down. It is not his words that didn't come home last night and it is not his silence. It is him. And he is what created the silence in you. He is what took the words from you. This is for you. This is for me. This is for the silence and all that it encompasses. I am broken but I am whole. And it is him that taught me to tear myself apart so I could learn to put myself back together. This is for him.

Ugh. He's so beautiful and that's what makes this hard. I wish I could hate his hands for tracing paths down her body but instead I find myself turning them into metaphors. Same with his eyes. I'm trying not to grace "I'm in love with someone else" with my presence, but those words are stronger than sleeping pills and Heaven knows I've been taking plenty of those lately. I'm too weak to stay but I'm too weak to leave, and I'm waking up every day hoping that I hate him but my love just keeps getting stronger and it's not ******* fair. The past is supposed to stay where it belongs but "I loved you three years ago when we met yet I was too scared to tell you" always seems to make its way back. "I didn't know I loved her then but it turns out I did and it turns out I still do." The cruelest thing the world can do is give you the love of your life at the wrong time. I can't imagine a world without his name hanging from a chain on my purse, and I can't imagine a world without listening to his soft snores on the phone because we're too in love to hang up. I wrote him letters every day for a month but I'm not strong enough to send them. "I still love you but I don't know what to do. I don't know what I want."
I know what I want.
It's him.
It's always gonna be him.

We sat in bathtubs in rundown motel rooms
I told him stories of my mother
He told me he'd never been in love
I noticed his uneven breathing
The way his chest fell a little faster
The way his eyes didn't have much glimmer
The faucet was dry
The bathtub was empty
We floated anyway
On broken promises
Taunted memories
Unspoken names
I saw every drop of blood
I saw every tear
I let him rest his weariness on my lap
I poured my attention into his flaws
Crooked teeth
Lopsided chest
The way his forehead wrinkled
Those were the things I remembered the most
When he left
I never loved him
He never loved me
But it was close
And it was tantalizing

Is there happiness hidden behind your withered bones? You've always felt everything too deeply, maybe that's why your ribs are broken.
How many mirrors have you broken since he left you? Every day is another battle between who you were with his oxygen and who you are now without it.
I think the saddest thing I had to witness was you carving his name into stone skin so you could bleed out all of him that was left in your veins.
You fill voids with sunset pictures and recordings of his voice when we both know it's killing you more than it's keeping you alive.  
How many days has it been since you overdosed on sentimental morphine?
How many times do we have to go through this until you realize he's not coming back?
He's never coming back.