I searched the surface of your skin looking for the answers to my personal problems

I looked for answers in your scars that I already knew but wanted to pretend I didn’t

I wish our love was easy like listening to old people talk about gas prices down at the local coffee shop over cigars and old shared wisdom

I wish there was a metaphor for all of this, but it isn’t that easy

I knew how dangerous you were and how dangerous you could be but I strapped on my helmet like Evil Knievel because you made me feel like I could walk through fire and come out untouched by the flames

I made myself a certain kind of Houdini, like your heart was some kind of magic trick to be figured out

I dipped my fingers into love and painted your face my favorite shades of forgiveness

I used you

I used you like the 3 month old bar of soap that sits in my shower,
I don’t use it often, but when I do, I hope that there’s still enough left in it to make me feel some kind of clean

I built you up like a sandcastle on the nicest beach imaginable and threw away the tools I used without realizing that there was a hurricane coming and that hurricane was going to rip away all of the progress I thought I had made here

I look for myself in everyone that I meet

I wonder what makes all of them tick,
What kind of gears turn inside of everyone that make them the way that they are, and I try to mimic the gears and use them to make my own heart beat

I used to tell people that I knew how to speak multiple languages because I made myself become fluent in your heart beat

it’s so funny now that I think about it because once we lose touch with something we seem to lose it completely,
I only know one language anymore, sadness,
and it’s the sharpest knife I own,
I wish right now wasn’t the time I chose to become self destructive,
Because by the end of this I just might hurt myself a little too far passed broken

I learned how to love myself the same day I stopped seeing heartbreak as a house that I can build piece by piece

In my dreams I walk on the lines of reciprocated love and happiness and never fall off but as soon as I wake up I find myself lying on the floor of my bedroom and I do not want to remember how I ended up here

Faith has always seemed like something that only people who feel like they’re about to die have,
Maybe that’s why I’ve been trying to talk to God since the first time I set myself on fire

She said she wishes she wasn’t so bad at this,
I tell her sometimes I wish I wasn’t so good,

Self love goes by a different name now