"I drive past that empty house sometimes, I wonder if I'll ever see you again. If you'll ever see me again. The lump in my throat is enough for me to turn around but I wish you'd see me somewhere and be brave enough to call out my name. The goodbye I didn't get to say lays crumpled up in a letter and in the texts I haven't sent to you. The agony of knowing you lay in someone's arms like you did in mine, is enough for me to have blinked my eyes clear of this fog. But oh god, my pens bleed onto paper, my thumbs bruise up against the keyboard. You are everything I write and i have become the ink that bleeds. No matter how much I struggle, even breaking through my shell, I leak all over the paper, still bleeding. And when the paper is flipped, the ink spots prettier than words ever could. They ask you to wipe me down but you too, are helpless as you gesture vaguely with your

//If someone was to ask me why I write so much about you, or about love in general I would have no answer. What must I say? That you consume all over? Or does my love for you do that? How do I tell them that I had been so far banished from intimacy in all stages of my life that the mere sight of it feels like an opportunity to be grabbed? How do I tell a stranger that there is so much pain, so much suffering I've witnessed, been a part of, that I can't let out of my chest? It's like a dragon, chased and locked up in a cage so small it has compressed itself. How do I tell them that if I were to twist the cage's lock open, I'm afraid I'll never be able to close it again? That it'll chase away all that is left of me? All that I want to have and to be? I wonder if you'd be able to look past it, look past the green moss over my mind, past the rusting on my heart and finally see what I've been hiding? The little boy that had been far too afraid of what they said was 'love'.&nb