“You needed someone who could fix you.”

A pause filled the air after I had said those words — not because we didn’t know what to say, but because we knew it was the truth. Sometimes, there was no way out of the truth.

You needed someone who could fix you — someone who would make you a playlist of the favorite songs you’d thought you’d already forgotten — someone who would take you to museums and laugh as you spill coffee on its clean floors. You needed someone who would look at you like you’re made of tiny poems caught between their eyelashes, someone who would hold your hand as the mountaintops melt into silhouettes from the rearview mirror, someone who would give you a box of a hundred hand-written things they love about you. Darling, you needed someone who could fix you — someone you could live for. And we both knew that I wasn’t that person, for darling, what I needed was someone I could fall apart and crumble with. What I needed was someone who looked close to my demons, someone who could crush my snow globes and trace poems on my skins with all its broken bits. I needed someone I could watch the summer nights fade into repetitive dawns. Darling, I needed someone who I could stay broken with and yet still feel human and whole.

And regardless of how much we could try to love each other, my hands would always find their way back to placing cigarettes between your lips. Your hands would always find their way back to writing poems for someone who could save you — and honestly, I no longer even know how to be someone you’d still write poems about. So I would say it again. You needed someone who could fix you. You needed someone who would fix you.



And all this time, I needed someone who wouldn’t fix me.