I'm writing things and I'm dreaming. The words and thoughts are spilling out of me and though I want to contain them, I can't. I haven't been this exposed since the day I first met you. That day, when I lost all barriers, all sense of me without you. I try to keep quiet. I know you want to live and you don't think I will let you live. I cannot live and I'm ashamed of it. You are the pinpoint of my universe. So small, yet everything will collapse without you. I don't want to feel these things. I've felt them before, long ago, and since then, I've taught myself to stifle feeling and become a stone. I've tried to crush my humanity and my capacity for love and when you were gone, I succeeded. But as you worked your way back into my life, my thick walls to live were flicked down like a thin sheet of paper. There isn't a barrier I can put up to keep you out. You see me. You know me and you have explored every part of my being. Nothing is a secret from you. I have tried to be someone else, someone that you want me to be. You deny the way I feel about you and because I love you, I try to be anything you want. I think you hate me, sometimes, because though you see that I try, you see through that mask I have erected. I sculpted it so tediously with the intention of getting every detail flawless and seamless so that only I will know. You saw it immediately. The hairline cracks in my exterior that I tried to blend with my painter's brush looked like deep trenches to you. You couldn't miss them. When the sky turns dark and I shut my eyes from reality, you are there in my dreams. I've never been able to keep you away from here, even when you were absent. My mind loves to think about you, even when you are not around or when I don't think of you consciously. As my body falls into dream state, it dredges up memories pod you and I, against my will, relive us and all the things I try to suppress. Today, I woke up feeling unrested because my dreams of you turned sour - to nightmares I never want to live. In these involuntary dreams, I lived apart from you, in a different place and you did not think of me. I could see you from behind an electrified fence. So close to see, too far to touch you. I was a memory deep in the recesses of your mind and you were happy now. I was left to a lifetime of torture, left to watch from a distance where trying to reach you led to death. Instead of death, I experienced a lifetime of pain, a living death of sorts. My dreams keep you alive but my exterior tries to keep you a secret. I want you to live, no matter the cost to me. When you are present in my thoughts, I am so vulnerable and so fragile. My dreams and pen will continue. I will live an alternate life behind closed eyes and write volumes for you. I will keep secret the truth from all but paper. I will never speak truth again because people might hear the pain in my voice and wonder what broke me. I will be silent and I will love you. My secret pain.