Peeling off layers of you, my skin is raw and exposed. Your touch has burned its way into my bones. I’d need an amputation to remove you.
My eyelids seared your face into the backs of them, I cannot shut you out.
My fists clench your remains with a state of rigamortis. They died the day I let go of your grasp.
The hollow in my chest echoes a beat my heart stopped making. The rhythm, once a record played, is now scratched and skipping tracks.
My head is full of cobwebs, where you spun your trap. I sit and wait for you to come to consume me once again.
My tongue just tastes the sweat of my defeat. To be swallowed by you is written on my tomb.
The decay inside this absence rotts my remains. But so did living in the light of your magnetic gaze. For it only lasted as long as I painted to your preference.
The scenes of me would flicker across your face. Your disapproval was the day turning to night. The kind that's haunted with a fright that steals a soul.
I move my legs towards the door, broken and gimping, I keep turning around to see you.
Standing there waiting with a knowing I can’t escape.
I wrote of you with permanent marker on the chalkboard. It can never be wiped clean. I have to write over you, again and again, as It scrambles the clarity of each new word.
I do my wash in your well and can't get the smell out of my clothes. It's musty allure stings my nose with each inhale.
You left your potion on my nightstand, I’m addicted to its intoxication. Only your alchemy can produce such a brew. This detox is as fruitless as the indulgence, as this ambiguity cannot be cured.
The magnitude of you shrinks my size to nothing. When you wrap me in your vines, I am a giant who falls from heights.
The ground is where you catch me, and my climb begins again.
I keep running towards the day I left behind.

my cheeks may be stained by tears,
my heart may be filled with scars,
and my head may still be spinning with the thoughts of you
but i'll continue to stand on my feet
unless you choose to destroy me completely.

Someone once told me that life is just a series of moments,
that the past is merely a story we tell ourselves before we fall asleep.
And so I look at him and I am reminded that I am not who I was a moment ago,
and that I shouldn't try to be.
I fear a reality of fiction and distortion,
where my life is a blurry foreign film and he is the fourth wall,
always broken.
I have written of lovers and their seemingly intangible hands for so long that my concept of time is impressionable,
one might even call it sacrilegious.
I have bled dry every metaphor capable of embodiment that I wonder if it ever meant anything,
I wonder if anything ever will.

I want to write him into a scripture of meaning, of something other than illustrated angish.
I want to write about something that isn't love,
that isn't a thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
I want to write about the way he leads me into rock pools,
like a child being baptized.

I look at him and I am reminded of the ocean,
as if his blood can only move in waves without devotion,
more like instinct.
I want to write about something that isn't love,
because this is more like inspiration.
This is not knowing what could possibly come after his tide falls back.

I am aware that literature always ruins the ending,
that finishing a book mid sentence is the only way to avoid the loss of its final words.
I am aware that beautiful things can never stay,
but maybe that's what makes them beautiful.
He is a picture of my perfect faith,
but he doesn't make me want to believe in religion,
because I know god hates the competition.

For so long I had thought that I was never going to feel anything new,
that I had exceeded the depth of emotions,
like anything that follows can only be a lesser version of something previously felt,
but here I gawk with a mouthful of blasphemous teeth.

I couldn't tell you about the snowstorm he evokes within my chest,
nor the locust plague that raid in his name.
Because this is not a love story,
at least not just yet.
This is a man that has grown roots where I have only planted seeds,
a man that scripts his stories on the soles of his feet.
*And so I look at him,
and I am reminded that I am not who I was a moment ago,
and that I shouldn't try to be.