Breathe

I loved to watch you, watch you so intently that you told me to stop or my eyes would wear out. Still, I found myself unable to remove you from my gaze. I felt so insecure, so unsure about your presence, as though you would leave at less than a moment’s notice. So I watched you, to convince myself of your real-ness, and to stock up on mental images of you, for when you finally removed yourself from me.

Loving you seemed like some desperate attempt to breathe life, to live out loud. In those early days, I felt as though I would die if I could not make it work with you. Getting down on my knees, begging you to stay, felt like gasping for air, gasping for my next breath. How can the presence of one man feel so vital to my life? I sinned exquisitely to love you, to make myself yours. Can you see the corpses that we created in the wake of our passionate destruction of each other?

Now that you’ve become only a fleeting and bleeding dream, I no longer fear the dark. You cannot hurt me. I cannot hurt me. And so, I turn off the light, because I no longer need to see my thoughts. I can feel them on my skin, light as the casings of dandelion seeds.