She doesn’t like to hear “I need you”
It’s difficult for her to say “I miss you”
She’s afraid that “I miss you” means that one of us
Can’t be without the other and she’s nothing if not independent

She says, “you should be okay alone.”
She says,  “you shouldn’t be afraid to lose me.”

I want to say “You shouldn’t be afraid to have me”
Love, when I’m holding you close, running my fingers across the soft curve of your arm
I feel the warmth blossom in me and my lips pour a waterfall of details and compliments
I want to make you feel as if you’re like nothing else in this entire universe

I don’t say
We are all the same

I spent my childhood being alone
I know how to count the cracks in my bedroom floor
The way you count up ways to improve and strengthen
Your steadfast mind
Build a wall that you can always go back to jump behind
I admire you

I learned when I was about nine years old that I don’t need to be alive

When I’m sad, I don’t try to fix myself
I was born onto a snow graced mountaintop on the verge of avalanche
I’m not afraid to shed a tear or two

You say, “Challenge yourself. How can you escape the dark parts of your mind?”
I want to say, “these days, it doesn’t feel so dark. Lately, they feel like thoughts. Lately, the only thing that differentiates sticks and stones from words is how other people perceive them.”

The dark that you see is a blanket
I wove it from the tatters of my ripped up sleeves, rubbed thin from nervous habit
I spun the hair that unplanted itself from my head like wilted flowers into rows of golden thread
I presented my heart, still beating, in two of my hands
And I laid it onto the heap, it doesn’t care if it’s scarred and neither do I
My darkness
Is the warmest thing I know

When I tell you I love you and point out every detail of you that makes me swoon
That makes my heart beat faster
That makes me smile
When I tell you I love you, I cry
And you always say that you love that
You say you love that I’m so attached to my emotions
That I’m not afraid to show it

When I tell you I love you,
I tap into the dark recesses of my mind
That you are afraid to look too closely at

And sometimes
The tears flood out like a leaky faucet
And I know that if you knew
You’d likely call it broken
Broken walls that I was supposed to be building like you do
Broken windows I should’ve been boarding up
I don’t tell you
When I tell you I love you,
I think of the fading scars stretched across my arms
Like cross outs and deletions in poems I’ve written
That don’t make sense anymore
I think of angry shouts and toppled chairs
Broken glass and locked slammed doors
I think of the whole world turning
For no one in particular
I think about how nothing matters
Nothing matters
Nothing matters
And it doesn’t matter
Because we matter

Because when your smile hits the sparkle in your crystal blue eyes
I know that over a million places I could’ve been at this point
This was the lucky one
And I’m here
To smile
To laugh
To cry
And sometimes I feel like I was built to be nothing
And then all the sudden, I don’t care
Because even the smallest nothing
Could have always been the world to me

I’m not afraid to want you
I’m not afraid to miss you
I’m not afraid to love you
I’m not afraid to love you

I’m proud
After everything
I have a blanket
And not a wall