About what?

I’m still bleeding internally from every time I’ve crashed into you like a wave, picking thorns out of my side that you’ve stuck there by omission, spitting my teeth out to show you everything I say is the truth, pressing cigarettes to my bare skin because you still want to be in my life.

In my life.

Despite the fact that you were cement on my ribcage and I ripped you off with my own bleeding hands so hopefully, at some point, I could jump back in the water without drowning on you, and you-- you keep calling me back to land, ensuring that I will never be capable of swimming until I’ve “talked” to you.

I have talked.

Drunk, high, so sober it brought tears to my eyes. If you doubt that all of my cards were always on the table, you don’t know me well enough to sink me like a stone (and I’m still sinking every minute of every day. I’m just teaching myself you’re not going to be the one throwing the life raft).

I am raw, transparent, hard to swallow around, and I have told you how I felt. I stopped sheltering you from the depth of my feeling the second you read me like a book and sitting in the back of your car, this bright white distance between us (that’s always been between us) I didn’t even hide this grating, dragging, bleeding rage. And I said what needed to be said-- you have not and will never love me.

And if that’s the statement you’d like to talk about, I’d rather not so I don’t have to go back and retrace it in every single word you’ve ever said to me since we met.

But you are also a vice--the clapping kind, the suffocating kind, the tethering kind, and the sooner I figure out how to make my own key, the better off for both of us. This is not solved by talking.

In fact, all we’ve ever done is talk.

Frankly, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.