Natalia Vela

I’ve handed out pieces of myself like party favors to those who did not deserve a taste. I have loved before, and I have loved hard, and all I ever got were scars. So please be patient with me if I flinch when you touch me with more than hands, like ice coming into contact with them.

But you left me afraid, afraid of opening myself up to anyone else, afraid of letting anyone touch me with more than just hands.

I suppose my love for you started to seep out from my pores, slowly, each time you broke me a little more, each time you hurt me a little more, each time I got closer and closer to numbness, because our love always felt more like pain than love, more tragic than beautiful.

We fall back into old habits – bad habits – with way too much ease. We’re thirsty, high and drunk on the act, we’ve got chatty mouths, hungry hands, and a fake light in our eyes. We begin to tear ourselves apart, yet again, in different ways on our search for wholeness.

I’m tired of burning, of being the one who waits, who wishes you came around to stay. But the truth is that you never will come around to stay, no, you don’t love me – not enough.

The best day in my life by far has been the day you last pulled out your blade on me, the day I finally was able to say enough.

I spent my time with you imploding and exploding, waiting on any reciprocity I could keep, until my palms were shredded with wounds from refusal to release the rope I tied around to hope that maybe you’d someday love me like I needed – like I deserved.

I just can’t understand how something without a label, how a thing that was never a thing, could seep into my veins; how it could make me feel so much, yet never good enough.

Try telling me I am not my disease on a day I’d walk through fire just to feel anything, or on a day I imagine what it would be like to sit at the bottom of the ocean and be drowned in its silence.

I know how special he can make you feel, when he tells you things that he says he’s never shared with anyone. I know, because he shared them with me, too.

When our hearts are screaming for more, we owe it to them to listen.