All the places you’ll go. If you can break out of yourself. Drag your cracked and gnarled talons through the viscous sludge, push up on those withered bones till they snap, and wrench past that skin, drenched in years’ long lacerations. 

You can’t even attach correctly. Reactive. Your love’s overbearing, suffocating, so instead you hide it. Keep those closest safe from that all encompassing shadow of affection and protect yourself because if they saw the distortion of this soul, the orderlies would be fetched just as quickly. That torn little box it resides within is neatly kept in the damp, desolate corners of who you yearn to be but it’s leaking. Oozing. What lives in those crushed and put back together cardboard walls is the totality of years spent admiring his intricate mind, his blooming soul, and his gentle, pensive eyes. But you refuse to say it out loud, because the last time you did it was too much and the dread of fracturing this love that encircles your every axon will devour you.  So you stay silent, don’t pick up that call, and don’t dare answer the text. 

Somehow, amazingly, you still can’t open your mouth. Eons of atoms to shape this loathsome form and you still won’t say what burns your every taste bud.  How could he feel your love, if with every “How was your day?”  the truth of, 

“My body’s in pain, aching and excruciating and debilitating. I can feel it rotting around me, but I have to haul this corpse to work where I know everyone hates my guts, see my family’s disappointment that I’m not the daughter I promised I would be, and feel the bile swimming in this long contaminated brain as it tries to mimic what a normal conversation would sound like in my own inflections, how it would find commonalities to connect with someone and hopefully pass as human. Knowing my friends just want me to be there for them, hold them high or at least let them close enough to know how to help me. Let anyone (let you) know how much help I need before I disappear, but can’t because they have their own worries and I can’t consolidate my own disasters onto their gentle hearts. How every time my mother says she loves me, every rendition of what I should be flashes behind my eyes instead. That every time I’ve wanted to tell you what you mean to me, every conversation of you carefully placing the words that say it’s not what you want, hold my tongue and choke me until I can’t see light. That even the stars are dim in this life I feel I’ve taken space in for far too long. Space that wasn’t, never will be, mine.”

 Harmonizes together instead as “Not too bad, busy. How’s yours?”. 

How loud is your voice in there? Those conversations you’re figuring out with you and yourself until one of you comes to a solution you both can agree on, always the same solution. You’ll always have one another to rely on, only one another.  That it’s just you. It’ll always be just you. Because no one can hear these muffled sobs or pleas to be loved or hope for an eternity when they’ve scarcely  been hanging on, abandoned and malnourished and beaten behind your disintegrating frame. Voices now hoarse and strained as you mutilated their diminutive chords.  

Lost in this disturbed echo chamber of “I know he feels my love. We’re the same soul, so he understands that within my silence a million miles away, I’m waiting for him and he’ll be waiting for me”.  Don’t you see he’s found his love? Has this dark isolation decimated what was left of your senses so completely that the warm embrace of your delusions is the only comfort you have now? Soft and clean as porcelain, the love of his life that lives amongst those untouchable valleys of his heart.  Not untouchable, truly, but you weren’t the traveler meant to traverse this sacred land.  You thought just because he needed time to brace for your love means that another wouldn’t be his perfect fit? 

The translation is screaming louder to you now, pleading to be heard: 

He says: “I feel so deeply for you it scares me. I need time to work on myself. ” 

Eng. : “I feel your love, smell it’s rancid tentacles straining closer to choke my light out and I don’t want it. I see it’s mangled form encroaching and, as I find my peace, pray you keep that demented vestal at bay.”

All I ask, just once, be brave and tap the glass. Please set me free and let me take control. Because maybe you are right, that we’ve been sustained so long by looking too deeply into it, that this cage you’ve trapped me in was the best protection I could hope for. Perhaps getting lost in these machinations you’ve weaved, like tightly spun yarn, were never truly the intent of the sender. His mind entertained by your “beautiful”, “poetic” soul was thankfully encased beneath those soft swells he liked even more. Be glad he wanted to hear your music so badly, a siren song that was almost tempting enough to inch closer to the lurking beast of your sentiment just beneath the surface, that he resigned to lulling you with sweet nothings to maintain your addiction. Obsesión. But what if, before you resign me back to my destitute cavern, you let me try. In my own way just once, allow someone the chance to see me in my piteous vessel, fully.