These Words Are No Longer Yours

It’s late. Too late. The evidence is sprawled across my lap, meanwhile you’re sound asleep on anything but a guilty conscience. Dawn is just on the horizon, the confines of this room painted with an all too familiar blue glow as the walls close in. It’s quiet. Too quiet. If you listen closely, you may just hear the sound of my sorrow spilling out of my chest. Drip. The beautiful oaths written to honor your once beautiful existence, the words skirting the edges of “I love you”s and all else I had dreamt you would say but never did. Tonight it is all washing away. Drip. Ink runs down the pages, taking with it the promises written but never binding. Drip. If you close your eyes, you might picture the sea carrying away the debris of the ground it kisses, or perhaps crushes.

The shore was never half as naive as I was.

It’s not lost on me, the time I spent treating you as if you were the sun. Unwittingly orbiting around you. I built my life around building you up. My lungs fought for air every moment I wasn’t hearing your laugh. My heart scrawled love letters faster than my pen could move. My hands fumbled with the broken pieces; my skin stinging against their sharp edges, and then there was me. Too cowardly to let them just slip through my fingers. Too cowardly to say goodbye.

I wish you lived in paper alone. I wish the scribbles and the rips and the burnt edges were enough to erase the memory of you; the way your words, words once sweet, course through my veins and through my bloodstream, refusing to bleed out without first tearing me apart entirely. But here you are. Perfectly intact. Perfectly undamaged. And here I am, having destroyed not only the pages you lacked to ever truly exist upon, but myself.

Some tell me that there is beauty in the pain you left behind. That every scar has a story; that there is purpose in the pain one fronts, in the cries they bury deep into the night. I say they’re wrong.

There is no beauty in the way you hurt me.

These thoughts, these feelings, these words, they are not beautiful. They are pained. They are scorched. They are imperfect.

But at least they are no longer yours.