One fragile bone at a time, you broke me.
You left me to piece myself back together with trembling and bruised fingers, remnants of that last kiss still burning like some form of sickly sweet acid on my tongue. The morphine did nothing to numb the dull ache that expanded from my chest, radiating through my whole body. The hardest part of it all was learning to walk again. Learning to talk. Learning to live with the thought that there would be no more late night dances to the dulcet hum of the refrigerator - no more Bacardi flavoured kisses when you came home after work, drunk, with another woman’s lipstick smeared over your collar.
I spent weeks, maybe months, mourning you as if I had lost my faith. Time became a blur. A drunken haze of afternoons spent lounging on the sofa or in a bathtub of cold water, screaming until it felt as though my rib cage was breaking.
You thought that without you, I would be rendered incapable. I’ll admit, for a while, I was. But each moment without you was a blessing. Through my heartbreak, I found my strength. I became the fire in the storm. You always had said that I looked like Hell’s angel in that red dress that you loved so much.

Oh darling, you should see me now.

Her eyes were a sea of chocolate, trapping sailors one by one in the warmth they held. Unmistakably the most beautiful of the Seven seas. A loyal companion, they said. It never leaves, watching, acknowledging us in our light and our dark moments. They say, if you close your eyes, you will feel her nocturnal predominance, her luminary reflection, her constancy under all her phases, and if you concentrate hard enough, you may even hear the faint whispers of the lost souls who watch her, wishing to be seen, wanting to be listened to.

She smelt sweet, like an addiction yet to be discovered by man. A dependency so intoxicating that it was soon familiar territory for lethality to become prominent in her victims, as they desperately aimed to cleanse themselves of her – but trying to forget her was like trying to forget human instinct. It was like trying to forget to breathe.