hey.. i'm sorry i didn't call. i actually wanted to, but, well, you know me.

you remember that first time we stayed up until five in the morning? i told you that i only know the kind of love that slowly rips your heart. maybe it's because all i've ever known about love was from the kind that came from ****** up people — my mom, my estranged dad, charles bukowski. her. there'll be always be something in me that will crave the recklessness, the emotional distances, running red lights and messing around. you see, to me love was walking straight into greek fire, but you make me feel like it's divine — just staying put and watching the flames with your head laid on my chest.

so it's not that i don't want this. maybe i do, with a newfound intensity that terrifies me. there, i said it.. and it's unsettling, you see. cause i don't know how to love you with the kind of love that doesn't involve destruction. i don't know how i can love you without greek fires burning us — sinking us. so it's easier this way. telling you that this is going nowhere and that i can't love you. i can't love you. *******, i can't love you.

please. forget i ever said anything.

and i love you like this:

in these freshly washed sheets,
with our limbs tangling,
with your breath on my skin where my shoulder meets my neck
under your gaze,
under what's left of the stars,
in the air, the scent of coffee, and apple crisps, and something that's just purely you,
in these cold, quiet hours before the daylight,
in the every silent ticking of the clock
with newfound honesty
with newfound softness
with each calming of my breath,
with each time it's taken away
with the high of knowing you're here and we're here.
and with the fear of that high,
with the sunrise so far away
with us just lying here in the stillness, in the dark
in the inadequacy of poetry — darling this is peak experience. this is perfect.

Somewhere in these long, midnight drives, somewhere in these litters of I love you's I never said, in the creases of my month-old sheets and in the calls I never made, somewhere between the daybreak and quiet Sunday mornings, between the lamp posts in the streets, between tonight and the first night I knew you, between the sound of hello's, and the sound of things ending for good — somewhere out there, darling, is a place where we've never fallen out love.

so i will lay on your feet a heap of the nightfalls we mangled. i will pick you a handful of hibiscus and cigarette butts left rotting in hotel beds. i will brew and end storms until your eyes are all that's left. i will leave the loneliest love notes and patched up apologies on every curve, every arch of your spine, until you become a book of the musings i cannot hope write. i will cut my chest open and unbridle the black holes i have tamed — darling, i will let them devour all the galaxies but us, until you become the very sun and i, the dull glow of the moon's unlit side.

and you'll know that the vile truth is, i don't know how to love you without getting my heart broken.