you should tell them the truth. tell them that if they hold on too tightly, love might cut them. tell them to hold on tightly anyway. tell them everything is worth it and that the richness of life is only ever enhanced by its inevitable, brief flashes of sadness and loss
that’s what you never got. it takes an entire lifetime to write the words “and they lived happily ever after.”
in the movies, the person leaving you never has a blocked nose when they cry. and all their tears are pretty.
i’m with them because, despite everything, i still love them. and while you might walk in and find me punching a wall, it’s only because i want to kiss their lips.
there’s no revenge here.
love doesn’t hate back.
if you find this, you are the second person trapped inside this heart. i do not know how long i have been here but i have tried to leave it as i found it: dark.
you know all their stories but none of their stories know you.
and you’ve felt all their pain but their pain has never bothered feeling you.
so you take their medicine. even though you’ve had too much medicine.
if you can pretend as hard as i’m pretending, this can be the first time we’ve ever met. not the last.
you keep telling me to be glad for what we had while we had it. that the brightest flame burns quickest.
which means you saw us as a candle. and i saw us as the sun.
when hurt turns red and a piece of your heart is missing. when the cold bites deep and you’ve got that feeling like you just got out of surgery. when the only way to stay sane is to concentrate on anything else but how you feel. when you count the tiles in the ceiling. when you push the earphones closer. when the first day of winter arrives. when you remember every nuance of every word of every time. when all this happens.
embrace it. feel every feeling. cry every tear. sob every sob. because this is what it feels like to have loved.
you had the sadness and too much of it. there’s no chemo for that except time.
as you drift further into the past, my memory of you fractures and splinters until all i can clearly remember is not a picture but a feeling.
you can walk into a room and spot them. they seem fine when you talk to them but every now and again, across the room, you catch them looking off into the distance at an invisible point that maybe, they once reached. they laugh a little different. they hesitate a little more. now they know what it feels like. and something about their eyes when they listen to music says:
“turn it up until my ears bleed. let it be the last thing i hear.”
so if you can’t stay, walk away slowly. rip the plaster off bit by bit, piece by piece. because i’d rather feel that than nothing at all.
there are a million ways to bleed. but you are by far my favorite.
