I love you; I think. It was a soft small infatuation, a bud placed into a field that we tended to. We basked in the sunlight next to the seedling, and over time it grew. I loved you, in the silence and the noise, I took everything you offered until our moments filled up all my shelves and overflowed. I loved you, so much so that I didn’t notice. The gaps you slipped into; the places you filled that held something once cherished. I thought our love was a field we could fill, a garden that we could tend to for years until the trees reached for the stars that would never compare to your eyes.
Except our love wasn’t a garden, you loved me like the waves loved the cliffs. You would keep returning to me until you consumed me; my edges softened to make room for you. Eroding me to make space for you in my gaps. Every part of my being – shaped by you – for you.
How blind must I be to love you even now, after I crumbled, forever caught up in your current? How stupid that I confused your claws for soft palms.
Yet even now I chase your warmth; cursed to wake up in a bed too large for one, in a house built for two. Free of you – it all aches, the shape you once filled gaping like a bloody wound. My skin is carved perfectly; every bump and grove made for your fingers. My body longing for your attention and freezing without your touch.
A million words, a thousand thoughts, a hundred nights. A dozen bodies that aren’t yours, holdings hands that don’t fit my grooves, staring into eyes that don’t see me, and worshipped by lips that will never compete with the roar of the ocean. The dozen clumsily made the holes bigger in their attempts to fill them.
they/them
