I've believed myself a sane man,
One aware of his every action and contradiction.
And I must confess my greatest crime

Being that I still love you.

A shameful truth I can't help but
Want to whisper to you.
Even now.
Even as you've deliberately tried to tear it away,
Abandon it to be left in the cold,
All while looking me in my eyes.

Except now, your eyes don’t hold the softness
You once promised belonged only to me.
Yet I see through your cold expression.
I see your lips quivering.
I know that you, too, suffer.
But I desire that you give in to it.
I beg of you to suffer.
Suffer with me.
Open your wounds to me.

But rather than choosing to succumb,
You refute.
You’ve chosen to plunge your hands
Deep into the most vulnerable parts of me,
The parts I promised were yours.
And yet, I still let you.
I want you to.
And I am a fool.

I hate that I am in servitude of you.
I hate that even through the images
I see of you,
Your skin against that of another man,
I still find inside me
A desire for you.
One now lined in hate.

A hate of what has become of you.
Of us.
But not you.

It pains me to see how easily
You summoned the will
To so casually give away what you cherished for us.
Not just your body,
But your heart.
And all for what seems to be
A desperate attempt to ignore your suffering.

A suffering I share.
One I bore.
And still do.

Enough to let me want
To keep staring into your empty eyes,
Looking for what used to be there.
What I know is there.
And I search, knowing that even when I find it,
I’ll refuse to return to you.

Because even if those fragments I touched remain,
They've been tainted.
They've been stepped on.
Destroyed.
And you chose to.

My words may seem cruel,
But all these words—
They are the words of an unrequited heart,
Arising from a man who still loves you.
Not the woman standing before him,
But the woman she was.

A woman who served as a bower,
Bringing a beauty I couldn't comprehend
Down to me.
Tangible.
Able to be felt.
Even if she couldn't herself.

And know this.
Even through your active attempts to hurt me,
I cannot lie but admit
You have forever saved a place in me.

And I'll live through it.
For you have enriched my life
Beyond a manner these words can conceive of expressing.
Only through my foolish attempts,
My suffering,
My willingness to still bleed for you,
Can I hope you at least understand
A fraction of what you have become to me.

So please—
If you must,
Hurt me.
One last time.

And when you cut my flesh,
Take as much away from me as you can.
Ensure the scar left behind will always draw my gaze.
Ensure that this part of me remains yours before you leave.

And I hope, through it,
You may understand
Who this girl I loved.
I still love
Was.

Why she was worth my suffering.
My tears.
My flesh.
My words.
My joy.
My future.
My kids.
My life.
My heart.

And in time’s passing,
A part of it
Will still call for you.

I look at us,
this broken mess we've become,
and all I feel is anger—
anger that we were supposed to be a unit,
a team,
a family—
but we are nothing but pieces of something that doesn't exist anymore.
You failed me.
Each one of you.
I'm lost in the rubble of what we were,
in the emptiness you left behind
when you choose your own needs
over what we were supposed to share.
I try to remember the good days,
but I can't.
Every happy memory feels like a lie now,
a story I told myself to keep the pain at bay.
I envy the people who have real families,
who don't know the taste of hollow promises,
who never feel the ache of knowing
that the ones who are supposed to love you
are the ones who destroy you the most.
And you—
you with your empty words and broken actions—
you don't even see it,
do you?
How much you hurt me
by pretending that everything was okay
when it wasn't.
You still don't get it.
You still don't care.
And the anger builds up,
like fire in my chest,
raging against the truth I've had to swallow:
We will never be whole again.
You broke us.
And I hate you for it.

but what if
I hate that I love her!?

I would you’d make me salt,
cast my name to the tide,
let the wind bear my ruin
to lands unremembered.

Twice, I split the sky,
unbarred doors best left veiled,
breathed storms where thy light
once lay unshaken.

Yet thou stand’st—
unmoved, unbroken,
a sky unyielding,
a river that takes all,
yet rages not.

Wouldst thou burn,
I should be smoke.
Wouldst thou drown me,
I should be rain.

But thou lov’st still,
and therein lies my undoing.