it's not that i don't love you. it's the sound i heard when i was 9 and my moms boyfriend slammed the front door so hard behind him i swear to god it made the whole house shake. for the next 2 years i watched my mother break her teeth on ***** bottles. i think she stopped breathing when he left. i think a part of her died. i think he took her heart with him when he walked out. her chest is empty, just a shattered mess of cracked ribs and depression pills.
it's not that i don't love you. it's all the blood in the sink. it's the night i spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my sister was going to be okay, after a boy she loved , told her he didn't loved her anymore.  is the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and the white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood.
so much blood.
it's not that i don't love you it's the time that i had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her ex boyfriend ****** his ex.
i swear to god she still has tear streaks stained to her cheeks. i think when you love someone, it never really goes away. it's not that i don't love you. it's the six weeks we had a substitute in english because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn't handle getting out of bed. when she came back she was smiling. but her hands shook when so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. and sometimes when things break you can't fix them. nothing ever goes back to how it was. i got an A in english that year. i think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays. it's not that i don't love you. it's that i do.