She did you a favor, you know.

By trashing your foundation

and leaving you in your own dust.

Because that’s where growth happens,

under all the rubble of heartaches, bad decisions, false tongues

and vulnerability.

my feelings for you are like coffee stains on the side of coffee cups—lazy friday mornings that I came to treasure still play on repeat inside my mind—you and I are lies told in the heat of the moment sweet but not the kind of sweet you can eat—we are a dissonance of words and smiles and moments that become a menagerie of odds and ends—you told me that this was this and it got a little out of hand—that you’ll know I’ll understand—and I wish I felt pain when you think of me—that way I would know if I mattered to you at all—instead of never knowing if I am sticky like syrup inside your head like the way you are inside of mine—but I’ll drown you out with words and liqour and other peoples lips until I don’t remember wanting to kiss you at all

I can’t remember

the last time I said I love you

without second-guessing myself.

I remember when I use to say I love you

and it rolled off the tongue on its own

it felt out of my control

I think we are falling out of love

and it’s out of our control.

I don’t want to remember us like this

and I only want to remember before and I can’t.

It kills me.

I can’t remember.

I can’t remember.

Why can’t I remember the feelings from before?

It was everything once.

and now it's nothing at all.

You broke my heart,

but I would let you

break it again and again

if it meant I could spend

just one more day

with you.

--water sloshing--

There are oceans between us.

Space, time, mind: they separate.

--collide--

Slamming me backwards, toes curling against the sand.

Waiting for your signal, wanting you to

--waves crashing--

want me.

Crumbling

--the water erodes me--

into dust as I stare into this ocean

that divides.

Just say the word

--bubbles escape my mouth--

and I will swim

--waterlogged lungs--

all the way to you.

--already underwater--

It wasnt you;

but the idea

of you

I was

in l o v e

with,

Immensely,

Deeply,

Foolishly.

Its not your fault,

really.

you must have tried to

live up to that

‘Idea’.

Oh, but one day

That day,

You finally got tired.

You saw her

Ah, and you thought

you could be yourself

with her:

Broken,

Crooked,

Cruel.

Because

She didn’t have

an ‘Idea’

of you,

lingering in her head.

So now,

you could rewrite

the whole book;

a new book.

and you started writing,

day and night

in and out,

with her.

And just like that

you became a

good writer;

you wrote volumes

with changed characters,

and altered plots.

Writers are

infact loyal

to their

lies.

I had not thought musicality could corrode a person. But maybe anything felt deeply enough has burnt its own path there.

My mum wrote a paper once on trying not to try, and it’s totally one of those things you don’t think about until you do, and it was probably the best thing that happened. I mean when we stopped. I mean when music stopped being the thing we were trying to do.

When I check up on you you're even in that cavity between air and breath, and isn’t it funny how some days are so easy that you can put out of your mind what it’s like to have to remind yourself of the in out in out in out in and I count these days like I’m trying to stop trying to find you, but part of me knows that as you diverge from the you I've learnt the less I'll squint to see you.

It's funny how everything is brighter with wet eyes. When there is no in or out, when the tears are neither in or out, there just is. I want to say I miss that for us, but can you miss a place once everyone has been taken out of it? I watch people tear themselves apart trying, and I want to say that the darkness won’t wait for you, but the Sun always knows how to find you.

And now when I think of you, when I follow the raw gin burn down to where I hold you, all I know to say is that the birds will always be there for you, and if it will soothe you, I am still looking to soothe you, even though there was only a short time when I was responsible for the shapes your mouth made.

I remember standing on a footpath in the city watching a marathon remembering you saying Do people know they don’t have to run marathons and then you started running and I tried to cheer you on and then I just wanted to get to uni.

Nothing has burnt through me deeper than realising too late that I’m meant to limit myself? That I’ve reached a new level of self-obsession now and I wonder if I inherited that, too. I still catch myself wondering if that’s because we tried music (and it never waits for you), or because you tried to stop yourself, or because I was meant to know when to roll over and float and in out in out in out in out in out in out in I have found that humans cannot sink faster than once they realise their weight.

You took my hand

and said

I'll show you a beautiful life

I believed

You're good

Honest and

Dearest

I allowed you

to take me away

By the bush

where roses were red

the sun was shining

You kissed me

and gave me the rose

I got stabbed at the thorn

My blood has run out

you laughed

And went away

I shed my tears

''Damn you bastard!''

I screamed

And rose overran

The ache is always there, evermore prominent in the dead silence of the night.

It's my constant companion, along with loss and regret.

It calls to the man who knew of my fragile soul, but then mishandled it anyways.

He dropped it without a second of remorse.

He looked me dead in the eyes, and just shrugged.

Yet my heart still yearned for him, weeping in its weakness.

It's not broken, it's shattered.

A puzzle without all its pieces can never be entirely complete.

He's chasing another, a lady of the night, ignoring the whispers from my being.

Like a soulless vampire, chasing his next conquest.

He lives on with no shame in his existence,

and I'm left here, drained of the very essence of my reality,

trying to patch up the holes in my body with a band-aid.

But I know, and he knows, I'm now the monster of my own nightmares.

He's changed me. The air has escaped my lungs, but I'm no longer struggling.

My heart has stopped wasting the effort.

I shrug in the silence that was once filled with my pulse, my eyes blank.

It won't be long before I destroy someone else too.