Do you see that I love you?

Tears splattering on musical notes,

As I watch you leave again.

My fingers are strumming from necessity

Because if I stop, they will take it out

On jiggling arms and fat legs.

Do you see that I want you?

My heart sighs every time you go

Because I know you’re crawling in with her

While I’m sat waiting here, writing,

Trying to remind myself that I do it for—

Love, I guess, but I don’t feel it anymore.

Do you see that I’m here for you?

Under the oversized hoodie and running mascara

That makes you think of her while you’re with me,

There is a girl trying her damnedest

To please you and be your everything,

And trying not to cry when you leave again.

Will you miss me? I think quietly,

Slicing again because I can’t keep pretending,

Looking through tears at notes and smiling

At my own creations until you blow in

And tell me that I ruin everything and how

You can’t believe I’d try to leave you like this.

Will you care the day that you are too late?

The day you saunter in, smelling of her,

To see my blood that I was too dead to clean

Splattered around the house you left me in,

On the stove and linoleum I was told to clean,

On the guitar I used to forget that you weren’t mine,

Will you cry or just walk out and marry her?

Will I even care about your answer anymore?

She shuffled slowly, dragging her IV around like a broken tail. I watched her longingly. I wished I could just shove her aside and take the tap out and have it once again. Have her once again. She noticed and looked at me stoically. My ears were becoming hot with anger. She was such a tease. I am Jack’s hand, itching to punch her right in the stomach. she finally passed my doorway and I looked at the ceiling. The remnants of my latest “tantrum” as the nurses loved to call it were painted on my ceiling. Browning stains and deep slash marks ran down the ceiling towards my head like daggers.

I was close. The doctors even said so, scratching their heads as they stood over my hospital bed recounting how they’d barely saved my life like they wanted a damn medal or something. I didn’t ask to be saved. We all knew that if they had been off already when I tried to get back to her, I would be with her. The light from my dirty window turned the stains maroon and I could hear the scraping, sticking wheels of her IV again as she walked past, giving me that dead stare. She was such a whore. I made sure she could see my ring. The thought of another superior woman always made her little ego shrink back into her loose fitting night gown.

My ring was the last thing I had to remember her by. That cheeky dimpled smile, those beautiful green eyes, those perfect golden-brown curls... it’s all gone. Now all I had left was this cold metal weight that I couldn’t get rid of. I saw her shuffling past again and reached fo rmy ring. My arm struggled against the handcuffs they placed on me, pressing painfully against my blood-soaked bandages. I winced, illiciting a small smirk from her a she wandered past.

I glared at the ceiling, trying not to say all of the angry words I was thinking. They’d only see me lashing out. Not her sauntering past my room, mouthing that she loved me. Not how she tortured me for her whole exercise time while they encouraged her. They didn’t hear those dreadful wheels or that look in her eyes when she hazed at me as she walked. It drove me crazy. Before her jaw was wired shut, we had group together. She had been clingy before but hearing that I was a widower only attracted her closer. Our chairs would touch during group and I could’ve sworn she always wrote her writes about her “imaginary boyfriend” about me.

I looked at my door to see her standing in my doorway, holding her IV in her hand. My eyes widened as she came closer, looking at me with her intense black eyes. She came to the foot of my bed, then to my bedside, staring me in the eye. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her body. I could feel my body reacting and tried to shift to hide my shame. I was unsuccessful, which got another smirk out of her. She took the IV and stabbed it into my hand. I was going to scream but the surge of morphine swelled in my veins. A stupid smile filled my face as my body warmed. She watched me longingly. I could hear her murmur something as she groped my leg. The euphoria made it hard for me to pull away. She pressed her mouth against my forehad and then my lips before slinking back out.

I watched the door long after she was gone. This changed nothing. I would still flash her my-- I held my hand up and looked at it for a long time. Something was wrong. the IV was in place and I still had all five finger but something was off. I stared until the sun had moved from my ceiling to my fingers before i realized my ring finger no longer gleamed. I wanted to sit up and scream for her but I as immobilized by the needle in my hand. My other hand was no use, and my whole body was too limp to care.

She took my ring. She took my ring. I decided then that I was going to kill that bitch. She took my ring and replaced it with something better.

It all ends the same, with me getting stabbed in the heart. One of the various gems from my childhood that often enters my mind when I catch a glimpse of my birthmark. Tucked beneath my left breast, I used to wonder about its origins as an eight-year-old inspecting my chest in the mirror. My brother and I would've been killed the same, was the general consensus by the time I was six, as my younger brother's was basically in the same place but on the left side. I remember gazing at myself in the mirror as one of my parents banged on the bathroom door and beginning to form the words that people now admire.

I spent the next four years of my life with towels on my head playing out fantasies of who I once was. First was Adira, a Middle Eastern woman who was forced to do dishes for her cruel tyrants. I would sit on the stair and waft endlessly between the staircase and the kitchen, dramatically telling the tale of a young woman who couldn't leave because her baby needed the money. Poor Adira was stabbed in the heart with shards of a plate when she dropped it while singing her big musical number during a big dinner party. I have no recollection of the baby. He was most likely was sent to the cellar where he was lost among the prisoners.

The story of Tammy soon replaced Adira. Unlike her predecessor, she was more privileged despite being a slave. Being blessed with predominantly white features, she had been taken into the house once her father died and was raised by his widow as her own child, as she never had children of her own. Tammy grew up to be a radical. Despite never knowing the truth of her heritage, she knew the struggles her mother had endured at the hands of her father and tried to fight for women. She joined abolitionists and later suffragists. She wrote news articles. She marched. She campaigned. A male friend of hers began to court her, and they wed when she was seventeen (way before the idea of "statutory rape" came into my young mind and probably before it was identified). She soon had her own daughter, a little girl with the hardest hair to tame in ages.

However, she was jailed during a campaign and when she came back home, her little girl was in the arms of her cousin, who wore a new golden ring. Furious, Tammy blacked out and awoke to scrubbing her baby's clothes in a sink of blood. Her daughter was crying as was she, and the kitchen floor was blood-soaked. She was halfway through cleaning when the police came, and she was put in an asylum. Asylums were brutal (as I was learning in school) and the young women were doused in water and beaten mercilessly. Tammy, no longer able to do anything but stammer her young daughter's name, gave up. She would inhale the water they were dunked in and laugh through beatings to make them hit harder. One day, she passed out while being dunked in water. She awoke but couldn't clear her airways. She choked to death staring the evil people who had captured her in the eyes, and hadn't seen her daughter again.

Tammy was replaced by a bevy of characters with no beginning and no end. There was a boy that got tackled too hard by his dad, then his younger brother who did drugs until he couldn't feel the pain. There was the girl whose heart was broken so she tried to get it out. There was the baby that got into his mom's cleaners and thought the green stuff would taste good. There were the two girls who were fighting and one pushed the other not watching where they were and her friend was impaled. There were the swordfighters, not to be confused with the bullfighters or the fools that washed up on Circe's island.

They came and went, little blurts of stories that came out at the most inopportune times. They continued until I got a character that wasn't going away any time soon.

Her name was Ingrid, and she and her sister, Shannon, visited my mind every night for about a year and laid out a terrible tale. They lived on an island in the middle of the sea in a large black mansion. The place was always rainy and windy and the girls would play tag and race throughout the house. they were almost always alone as their mother got sick and died two years before we became connected. Their father had sailed away on a tiny boat, and they were being raised by their brother, Michael. Michael had a dependency problem and would normally leave them on the island while he went inland for them to work leaving the nine-year-old and her six-year-old sister to play alone. Ingrid truly enjoyed it.

But, Michael went off the deep end one day. He couldn't leave due to a bad storm rolling in, so he secluded himself in his room. A red hue always distorts the image, but he does cocaine for hours until he can barely see. He can hear the girls downstairs giggling, they'd been giggling for hours, and it's annoying him. He pushes the rest of his stash into a mug and clumsily stomps down the stairs. The girls are playing one of their favorite games in the kitchen and barely notice their brother until he throws china around the room, hitting Shannon and knocking her out. He smashes every single plate and throws food at the girls until the stash they had for the storm was all over the kitchen, including his sisters.

He drags them into their bedroom and the picture is swirling now, like the scary scenes of Rosemary's Baby. Ingrid did her best to spare me the details, but I understood that her brother lost his mind and tortured the girls for two days before killing them and tossing them into the ocean. Every night for several months, I let her tell me a bit more about her story in my dreams. On the last day, when the final part of the story was laid out, I shed a tear and stayed around until after the police officer left and the doors were shut forever. After a bit, I woke up to a wet pillow and very little recollection of what I'd witnessed.

Once her story was done, Ingrid didn't disappear. My perception of her hadn't changed over the year. I honestly think it'd upset her. She wouldn't talk at all, she'd just stay close enough that I could see her and sit on the floor looking at me. After a while, she asked why I didn't hate her. I told her I had no reason to be. She asked why I wasn't scared of her. I told her I had no reason to be. She asked whether or not I still wanted to be her friend, and I told her yes. Over the week or two that followed, I saw less and less of Ingrid until she was just another forgotten memory.

I was growing up by then. My mom and I had turned her old office into my bedroom. I was going into middle school. I had new friends. Most importantly, I got my very own computer, a Windows 95 that I shared with my brother. I tried writing Ingrid's story, but it just wasn't right to tell. Even in this piece, a lot of the story has been cut. It's too graphic, but now I don't feel horrible for spewing someone else's story, even if it's someone I probably imagined. I guess it's finally time for me to tell her story and the others, though they're less in detail. Ingrid ultimately is just as much of a part of me as this odd-shaped birthmark under my breast is, and even though I left her story behind when I moved, she's always moved with me.

My name is Na. I am five years old and Ma just finished weaning me from her breast. I bet you’d be surprised to find that you, too, have Neantherdal DNA because of interbreeding. I was shocked to find that I must now help gather food stuff such as berries, grasses and nuts. I’m too little for this but each of us must work together. I am a girl. We all do the same things whether we are boys or girls. When I become a little older, I must hunt for wild animals. We all work together and if someone is sick or injured, we all take care of them. I can expect to live for about 40 years. We can talk in our own language but you probably won’t believe this because we have no written language so there is no proof. If you heard me, you would say I have a loud high pitched voice. Da is teaching me how to make tools. Sometimes I play with toy axes with other children but I don’t have much time to play.

I am short and have little legs but I am strong and have a straight spine. My head is big and I think I’m pretty smart. I can see and smell better than you can. I am always busy but I am okay with this because I don’t know anything different. I love my Da and Ma and my family group. When someone dies, we bury them and put flowers on the ground around them. Ma and Da are artistic and paint pictures in caves. I want to learn to do that. They know how to start fires and boil their food. I don’t think there are many Neanderthals in the world because I never see anyone other than my family and some others in our group. Maybe I am wrong but I don’t know. I don’t have much knowledge of anything bigger than where I am but I don’t think I am missing anything.

I am Jason. I am 5 and Mommy and Daddy never make me do chores. When they feed me, if I don’t like it, I say so and don’t eat it. When Mommy and Daddy say for me to do something, I talk back. I am learning bad language from my older brothers who just play computer games and talk on I-Phones. I will get an I-phone next year when I’m in first grade. My brothers don’t like me very much and are mean to me but then, I tell on them.

I never see my grandma and grandpa because they live in Florida. I guess they don’t care about me because they have their own lives. When they get old, Mommy and Daddy will put them in a nursing home and never see them, except at their funerals.

I will never learn cursive writing because I will use a computer and I am not expected to learn math because I will use a calculator. Soon computers will think for me so I don’t know what I will have to do then. I don’t really have to think much already because my parents say they know everything. Daddy and Mommy will probably live to be old – maybe 65 or 70, but they’ll be very fat. Maybe I will be fat, too, because all we ever have is fast food. I think all of us will have horrible diseases when we get old. Mommy and Daddy don’t spend much time with us because they work long hours and feel guilty so we can have anything we want. When we are together, everyone is on cell phones and no one talks to each other. I don’t really play too much with others because they are always inside with their electronic toys. I don’t think I am happy but when I feel sad, I eat candy and potato chips and I feel a little better. I know that when I start my education, I will have to study all the time so I can be better than anyone else and make more money. Nobody cares about taking care of the earth so it probably won’t be there when I grow up and then what?

I have learned the most important thing in life is to put yourself first.

Not in the sense that you can never put somebody else before you, but that for the most part, you need to think about how something will affect you. Can you stand back from yourself, from the pressure put on you and think about what the end result will be?

If you're asked to stand out in the cold, are you going to do it? Or are you able to refuse because you know you'll be sick within the hour?

Sometimes, we meet people. People who we think will be our everything, whether it be a significant other, or a friend, even a family member. We think we know them. We think they would never do anything to hurt us.

And perhaps, it's not intentional.

But intentional hurt is still hurt.

And sometimes, that person becomes everything to us anyway. We would kill for them. They are all we want, all we think we need.

But after a while, we can feel that something is off. It may be a subtle feeling, or perhaps, it's one we won't admit to feeling. Suddenly, we feel ourselves searching for something else, but at the same time, we are hoping that 'something' belongs to them.

However, as time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the obvious.

This person is toxic.

What a difficult thing to admit to oneself.

But when you're in a relationship where everything you do is wrong because the other person says so, even if there is no reason for them to think that. Where you do something one way, and then try it another, and another, and it can still never be right.

When somebody toys with your emotion, manipulates you.

And you tell yourself, you're leaving.

For good.

But later, you find yourself coming back again.

And again, you find yourself with that pit in your stomach. You find yourself replaying every memory with this person over and over, and none of them seem to be good.

And you keep yourself in this loop. You tell yourself that forgiveness is key. That they'll be different this time. That they can't hurt you again.

Afterall, you have been bulding a resistance. You think your walls are strong enough to withstand anything they may throw at you.

So when you go back to them again, you go in thinking you're bullet proof, and yet, they know where each and every crack is located. They have built ladders to climb over the wall and dug tunnels to reach beneath it.

And there you are again, hurting and exposed with each action and each word they toss your way. You realize, that instead of growing stronger, you've grown weaker. Your knees buckle and you feel as if you're going to cry. You want to hide, but you have nowhere to go.

But eventually, you have to make a choice.

The hardest choice you will ever make.

You have to choose yourself. This is your life. Nobody else can control it. And so you steel yourself. You get ready for the epic battle you are about to cause. As you decide, this time, when I walk away, I am not coming back. And this time, you mean it.

And suddenly, everything floods from your lips, every word you left unsaid. Every feeling you had tucked away. And you tell them that you're gone. They laugh, reminding you of each and every time you came running back, or every time you begged them to stay. Because, after all, they owned you. They controlled you.

You take a deep breath and you turn and you walk away.

And in that moment, you know you have to prioritize yourself. You spent so long trying to please somebody who didn't give a crap about you. But now, you are going to give a crap about yourself.

Something is really wrong, showing up today like this. Something is really wrong, unable to stand still. You words slur, you eyes glassy and animated. Your movements slow and deliberate. Every word is forced. I can tell you are trying you best to act normal. Trying to act like your world is not falling apart. You drop a penny and stumble to pick it up. You catch yourself on the counter trying to look smooth. You don't.

I am not the only one to see your world shattering. He does too. He pulls you aside - into his office. The door closes behind you. I don't know what happens behind closed doors. No one does. But I imagine it is nothing good. Nothing good ever happens behind closed doors. An hour later you reappear. A smile is plastered haphazardly across your face. Your smile does not meet your eyes. You shake off the weight you have been carrying all day. You leave it on the ground as you pick up your backpack. One last glance in my direction. One last lopsided grin. This time it does meet your eyes. For a brief moment it is as if nothing had changed. With a wink you turn and walk out the door, shoulders square, head held high. The door shuts behind you and I whisper my goodbyes.

he's chewing on

the shadows of her

in his memory,

trying to taste

that feeling

of morning,

when he made his way

through the dark

as she slept,

already missing the sound

of her breathing

in rhythm

with his tiptoes,

knowing with each step

she'd wake up

disappointed that

she didn't get to

tie her heart to the scene

of him pulling himself away,

but she's never looked down

on herself like this,

with parted lips,

sleeping as though

all the world existed,

to give her rest,

and he'll chisel

the moment like stone

until recollection becomes silk

and every detail is captured

like sunrise bleeding blessings

upon his day.

and she'll dream

of making him coffee

while he locks the door.

and he'll wish the sun would die,

so his day could be filled with

dreams of her,

instead of memories

too swift to hold