Burning

I am confused daily by the amount of pain and anger that comes with each dose of love. I cannot comprehend when it got so messy and tangled, or when the words "I love you" quit being enough. I've been catching myself in the shower, still foggy with the dreams from the night before, sobbing because my reality is not what I want it to be.

The most utterly terrifying aspect of it, really, is that I cannot pinpoint where my unhappiness stems. There is not one deed, or lack thereof, that makes me feel as though we are falling apart. The more I think upon this state of melancholy and despair, the more futile and sluggish it make my emotions feel. I can say I am giving my all. I can say that you are doing enough.

Where is the gap? I feel achingly hollow, and barren, and distant. I cannot keep your attention, and I stopped caring why. I have driven myself out, I have stretched myself thin.

Tell me you want me. Show me that you'd cross the ocean and take me back even when I had faltered. Like I have for you. Shake me and kiss me, and scream that you need me. I want to see it written on your face and stinging in your eyes. I want you to die without me. I want the very thought of my absence to make you out of breath and as hollow as me.

These were the things I felt for you, before I realized you didn't feel them for me. These are the ghosts that haunt me. I am in love with you, oh so in love with you, but not the way you are in love with me. You are my conviction, my religion, the fucking blood in my veins.

And I am a convenience, a nicety, someone you could do just as well with or without.

I can feel my passions seep from my soul, I'm turning gray in your midst. I can't turn away, you're the best that I'll get. I just wish that you were as set ablaze as I have been since the moment we met.

Ticks and Tar

I hope you hate me. I hope when you look through my pictures and through his, it tears you apart, rips you to shreds. I hope that you have nightmares about me stealing kisses from his lips. I hope my name is engraved into the back of your head in the worst kind of way, because when you hear it I hope your stomach twists and the putrid taste of bile rises in your throat.

I hope you feel this way because it's the way I feel about you.

I know I shouldn't, I know I should just let it go, this rancid jealousy that has found it's way into the darkest pits of my heart. But the only thing that gets me through it is the thought that I taint you the way you poison me.

You keep me awake at night, ever present in my dreams, lurking in my nightmares. I feel you while we kiss, and when his hands run down my spine. I wonder how many times he tangled your wet hair in the shower, and if he called you 'love' or 'baby', I wonder if he gave you the same tilt of his lips when he said your name, I wonder how many times he moaned it. I wonder how many times he still does in his dreams.

I hate you because I am afraid of you. I hate you because you will never go away, a beautiful tragic picture of his past that he will always want to re-do or correct. I hate you because you make me feel insufficient, stale, and dull.

I never took him from you, but you're taking him from me. You are clung onto him like a demon on his back, like a tick in the nape of his neck.

I hate you because I am sure he thinks about you as much as I do.

I hate you not because of the stranger you are to me, but because of the memory you are to him. The memory that he is drunkenly still in love with and that I am agonizingly aware.

I hate you because you will never love him as much as I do. Because you will never be as good for him as I am, but he will always want to come running back.