She gave me a necklace, and in my hand I held more love then I had ever touched with bare skin. I wore it like chains, and every second was wretched.

Her love pressed into the skin of my neck and I couldn't speak until I had ripped it off with my bare hands bleeding and torn. When she saw the shattered silver she asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.

She fixed the necklace and my fingernails turned to dust on its chain, and each time she asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.

Over time the necklace rusted and I rusted too. Links became skin, and lockets turned bone, and she didn't need to fix the necklace. She still asked me why I hated love. I didn't have an answer, so I stayed.
  
Three years later, when a stranger cut the sickened metal from my neck, I asked him how love could be so choking.

He held my hand, and while we walked away he told me, with a smile full of scars, that the necklace wasn't love.