i think, without realising it, i have been cutting parts of myself out to leave them at your feet like a dog with a bone, and now that you’ve walked away, you’ve taken away so much of me with you that you have more of me than i do. and what i’m trying to say is that you can have me, all of me. you can sink your teeth in and exsanguinate me, drain all the blood away, and my lifeless eyes would still be full of reverence, my lips curved in devotion. what i’m trying to say is that if you stab me, i might thrust myself deeper into the blade so as to be a few inches closer to you. what i’m trying to say is that even your abuse feels like a caress, and bruises feel like beauty when your hands are the ones that cause them. what i’m trying to say is that i’ve only ever been yours, before i knew you even, perhaps. it was always you. even if the universe conspires to take you away, i will fight tooth and nail. i will make the red string they call fate from my veins and tie us both on the ends. you feel like the first breath of fresh air after almost drowning to death, and if i were sure you would be mine in my dreams, i would stake my whole life on them and be done with the rest. what i’m trying to say is that you are a religion of which i am the sole practitioner. my altar lies in the curve where your shoulder meets your neck, and i’ve never been gentle, never known what it means to be tender, but for you, i’m willing to try. i would have loved you were you never born at all. i would have spent my life with a hole in my heart and a void shaped just like you, and i would have felt it sometimes, when the sunlight hit the trees just right, that there was this cosmic love i somehow missed despite never knowing. i would take anything from you, anything you’re willing to give, and in return, you can take everything from me because i’m willing to give it all. i think you knew all of this when i ripped the heart out from my chest, mangled, bloody, bleeding, and you took it and squeezed it to a pulp and threw it to the ground, spat on it and stomped all over it, looked over at me with a malicious glint in your eye, and all i could think was how much this felt like salvation and godhood and homecoming. all i could see was how beautiful you were, and all i could regret was that you might never come as close to me again. and you were never as beautiful as when you decided to leave because, for a moment there, i really felt it, the full force of your attention, and it made me giddy, made me delirious, made me fall, impossibly, even more. what i’m trying to say is that there is no force in this world that could stop me from falling at your feet in this sick, twisted pantomime of love that reads more like devotion and tastes of enmity. but although it is convoluted and messy and a hundred things it shouldn’t be, it is love all the same. you could spit on me and i’d probably thank you for it. you could choke me to death and i would think only that your hands are finally, achingly, hauntingly, on me.
