She was ******  
Shattered and frayed, her guilt thrummed like a live wire,  
just feeling it all—  
the agony and the nothingness,  
intertwined like roots of a twisted tree,  
growing in soil laced with despair.  
  
He was ******,  
caught in the riptide of love,  
clinging to the driftwood of someone else’s anguish,  
his sin?  
This desperate reach,  
a lifeline that twisted like vines  
suffocating the very breath of his own heart.  
  
She was ******—  
a jigsaw of herself,  
pieces ripped from her skin,  
reassembled to fit the gaps of others,  
her hope—  
to stand in the light  
and finally feel her own shadow.  
  
She was dangerous,  
her fragments sharp,  
like glass scattered on a forgotten floor,  
and every hand that reached out  
bore the chance  
of slicing through her skin and the tether  
to her still-beating heart.  
  
He was dangerous—  
each sinkhole of sadness,  
his love,  
an ocean that swallowed the buoyancy of laughter,  
his heart bled onto them,  
the crimson tide drenching those  
who dared to tread too close.  
  
She was dangerous,  
those myriad pieces,  
each a path to the divine or  
the infernal, a kaleidoscope  
of God’s dreams and the devil’s whispers,  
and in her longing to be whole,  
the lines blurred—  
the beauty and the brutality, intertwined.