it's laughter and loving i disdain

I wake up in the dark and he reaches his hand out to me, half asleep. He doesn't know what this gesture means to me.

The antidepressants are on the bedroom floor, my belongings scattered between two cities.



This was all I had written.

I refrained from writing about you because it seemed like an awkward thing to have loom over us ("beware, kiddies, or she'll write about you on the internet").

I wore your shirt all day but the only things I could smell were hot, bitter and acrid.



After the fact, I couldn't make up my mind between booze or a cig. In the end I ran out of the house in the middle of the night, got in the car and shakily drove off into the black, Peter Silberman filling the emptiness.

After the fact, I expected more. The pain doesn't turn on until I'm confronted with the realness of you. Once a week for the better part of nearly a year, I'm more ambivalent towards your absence than I ever knew.

subsume

So listen,

It's been three years and I still find myself taking all the blame. I imagine this fact would make you happy, providing you the comfort of knowing that I cared enough to be hurt by you. In the end that was what it boiled down to, hurting me to prove that I still had a heart at all.

I may be bitter, but it still scares me when I can't find you. I hold my happiness in a book and you transform in front of my face, you take over my dream and I follow you, hostage to my guilt, bound by your anger towards me.

When he held me too tightly as I struggled to staunch my mental break down, I knew exactly where I had felt this before.

I sit at the bottom of a fish bowl.