darling, loving me is falling apart with octobers and kissing your poems goodbye. it is watching autumns unfold while slipping into the tracks of a freight train. i will kiss your skin, all chapped lips and sweetened cigarettes, my hands on your neck, as if feeling the walls of an athenian ruin. i will be every distinctive silhouette in a film, every line in a song, every secret spilling gracelessly off your lips before you catch yourself. i will set you on fire and you will burn; all wide-eyed and irises made of the storm, beneath my feather light touches.

i have a proclivity for breaking hearts and you will find yourself neck-deep in whirl of heartbreaks and headlights — all moonstruck and confused. i will break you — destroy you, bit by bit, in the most elaborate, exquisite way, that you will know one thing, darling —

chaos has a tendency to look beautiful.

i wish knowing you're not worth the words is enough to make me stop writing about you.

but apparently, it's not.

and i wish i was sad enough or hurt enough or broken enough to actually feel something, and not just emptiness after emptiness after emptiness.

this is how i'll let you go:

i'll open our photo albums for the last time, touch the yellow edges where your body ends, and not get drunk on what we could have been. i will wipe the coffee stains you left in perfect circles; sometimes, i pretend that they had the color of your eyes when the sunlight hits them. i will scrub your fingerprints off my spine; it's time for them to let me go too — slower, gentler than the way you did.

i will pass by your street, and not send you a bunch of paper rings engraved with all my overused metaphors. i will not hope you'll chase after me, wearing them over the promises we've broken, and over the promises we're yet to break. i will stay up late; midnights are somehow still for missing you, but i won't be writing anything. and we both know it kills me — not writing poems about you, when loving you and losing you are the closest things i ever got to call poetry.

instead, i'll hold on tight on every word that spills out of my mouth, seal them all in a trinket box buried in some place where we let romance die. i will fall asleep next to our cemeteries, wet from the rains we made; i might wake up at 3 am and not think of calling you. and i will wake up at 7 am, when it's still raining, and i will watch the early morning thunderstorms, and i won't wish you're back with it. i will sit there, free from the damp coffee stains and from the traces of your kiss. my tailbone will no longer recall the intricacy found in your fingerprints, and my eyes — they will have forgotten if yours were cobalt or turquoise or electric blue, 'cause darling, maybe it's too late to make you love me again, but it's not too late love myself.

I know I have been okay for a while now, but it feels odd — not knowing how to handle being okay. I have been held captive by the emptiness — the kind that consumes you from the inside out. I have been that girl, trapped in a skin, and my wrists have become the walls she scratches whenever she tries to escape.

I have fallen apart with sunsets to déjà vus I have long forgotten, and my brain — it has become Eris incarnate and my body — her armless prey, walking willingly into her trap. I have been Ophelia, tiptoeing on a willow tree and drowning in a lake of deep, black butterflies. So being okay and all this — it doesn't feel right at all, and maybe it's possible to despair for sadness. Maybe it's possible to morph with the darkness I thought I wanted to escape. Maybe it's possible to ache for self-destruction with an intensity I've never known before.. I no longer know what's wrong with my brain, but maybe it's possible to feel so lost, so broken, so messed up for so long — that being whole feels like a mistake.

There were midnights when I could still tell you about my dreams. Of course, they were always about us — marvelling at the colors of the sky. With you, standing under the sun and getting lost in the afterglows and collapsing with the black holes sounded romantic. One night, I would dream about reading the books we collected together. Other nights, I would dream of kissing the tips of your lashes inside our blanket forts in terry cloth robes and Birth of Venus and Starry Night socks. Regardless, we would be up at 5 am — you with your whole bean coffee, listening to the tales authored in my sleep.

Except that in my dreams, it still feels like her instead of you. It always does. So tonight, I hope you keep yourself warm and touch the dream catcher tattoo on your nape and not think of me anymore. I know that I'm the reason for your sleepless night and memories dressed in nightmares, but tonight, I hope that you go back to sleep and no longer dream of the love I fabricated. And when it's 5 am, I hope you realize that you need something a little better than my dreams. I hope you brew your coffee to the right strength and no longer look at where I used to sit to tell you my daytime stories. So go back to sleep now. You'll be okay — without the what if's and the dreams and the happy ending written in our name. You'll be okay, darling.

You'll be okay without me.

Some days, the emptiness isn't even obvious. You're brushing your teeth or putting on your favorite denim jacket or adjusting your wristwatch and it's there, lurking and you don't mind at all. It almost feels normal. Right, even.

But there are days and nights — mostly nights, when it feels colossal, you can't ignore it. There are times when it stares back, it's impossible to pretend it's not there. There are times when it feels out of place and you just sort of wanna dig for what's dead inside, or claw through your ribcages, or crack your chest open — anything, just to get it out of you.