If everyone's always pretended to love you
Maybe you've learned to play along too.

I am a hole
No substance
No matter
Nothing matters.
"You matter."

The only thing that has any weight to it
Is you,
It's you who holds me down
And stops me from floating away
Into the abyss of
Stoic thoughts
That tumble through my mind.

My lungs are shrinking with the pain of missing you;
You seem so far away
Even though you're beneath my fingers,
And the only thing running through my mind
Is your voice
Saying, "You can't be a child forever."

When he holds me, I become small.
When he looks at me, my confidence disintegrates.
When he kisses me,
I can feel the weight of his lips
Holding me down
From everything.
"Yes I can," I reply.

Drive your sharp words into me like daggers
And watch me bleed excuses for you onto my bedroom floor.

They told me to paint what I felt
So I left the canvas
Blank.

Sometimes the feeling of loneliness becomes so tangible that the void seems to swallow you from the inside out, emanating from the stomach and reaching out, engulfing the body like a fist closing around a tumbler of whiskey.
This void takes on a weight; light at first, bearable. The tumbler of whiskey with a resting hand around it. Then the fist begins to close so forcefully and the cylindrical glass of the tumbler has no choice but to shatter from it. The glass shards scatter and the whiskey flows and the fist still keeps closing. Always closing. Never resting.
Never resting.
Sometimes when I miss you, when I feel like a tumbler of whiskey enclosed in your fist, I imagine your voice inside my head singing along to your favourite song. I imagine your arms around me, your hand spreading warmth up my thigh, your tongue dancing along my collarbones, up my neck, and tracing the bottom of my earlobe. I am not beautiful but your mouth has me almost convinced that I could be.
Sometimes when your arms are around me, I feel like that tumbler of whiskey encased in a fist. When you kiss me, I feel myself shatter and I feel the whiskey run. But it's not whiskey, it's love. It pours out of me whenever you sing the wrong lyrics to your favourite song.

Sometimes when I think of you, my lungs feel like they're shrinking and I imagine your voice in my head
Telling me that you still think about me in that dress.
Sometimes when I'm kept awake at night, I imagine you're having trouble sleeping too
Because the weight of my hand is not holding you still.
Sometimes I get so tired of waking up alone with the lights on and my heart in my throat,
That I can't help but imagine a million ways to tell you that I love you
Without using the actual words.
But did I ever tell you about the day I woke up as a fire?
Or how the voice that echoed in my skull once told me, "This is what you are now"?

I am burning alive,
I am screaming, "Fire",
And I am holding the lighter.

Some days I get so scared that I feel it throughout my entire body
And I feel too heavy to move.
I've been trying to retrace my steps for years,
Trying to recall where I buried the body of the girl I once dreamed of becoming,
But I am paralyzed with terror when I realize how gentle you are
And that I want to fill your lungs with whispers of poetry, your ribcage with hand-picked wildflowers, and your mind with thoughts of me in that dress.
If I could just make you feel a fraction of this war in my chest then maybe
You could see why I am in love with the sunlight that is pouring out of your mouth
But I'm too busy chasing shadows to admit it.
Some day all this pain will be so beautiful to us,
But until then,
Don't expect to show up at my doorstep with your heart in your hands and have me cup your face and welcome you home,
I have a terrible habit of locking the door.

Lately there have been days where I catch myself looking for you in the strangest places;
In train stations, sanctuaries, the corners of your room that you never set foot in,
And there have been days where I feel so small that just leaving my bed seems like the bravest thing I've ever done.
I blame it on the way you seem to swallow my darkness without absorbing it,
The way my chest tightens at the thought of your touch,
The way I cradle the ashes of what we once were.
We ruined each other with passion and fire,
And there are days where that fire still burns in my chest, migrates to my head,
And my skull begins to feel like a whiskey glass in a bar fight.
These days no one ever tells you about the difference between heat and warmth,
You learn it yourself when his hands scorch your skin and his fire burns through you
While he pours lighter fluid down your throat.
I wake up as a stranger in my body these days and I whisper to the mirror, "I just want to go home"
And thoughts of you remind me of how to get there.
It seems like we're straddling the line between love and Stockholm syndrome
And it's automatic for me to call you by your sins rather than your name,
But these are the days when I need you to lap up this nectar and hear this truth,
As well as all the blurred intentions behind every "I miss you."