Death and all her friends

The stone steps burn hot and angry against my calf. I shift to get more comfortable. You shift uncomfortably.
“So we’re cool, right?” I ask, tugging at a stray thread on my t-shirt.
“Yeah”, you say, twisting your fingers into imaginary guitar riffs, “We’re friends.”
I watch you and how you make sure to not touch me. Not even by accident.
The thread begins to unravel.
The stream of difference between us has widened into a chasm of indifference. But your mask is slipping. You could never tie your shoelaces, how did you expect to keep your façade from falling?
A bell rings. People weave their way down the old stone steps, steps that have stories etched into their cracks. Steps that go up, steps that go down and steps that have you sitting in the middle when you have nowhere left.
No where. Now here.
I lean back on my hands to protect myself from being pushed into you. When I turn to look you’ve got your toe wedged between the banisters. Your defense is fool proof. Mine isn’t. Someone steps on my fingers and I wince.

“What happened?” your guitar is dismantled mid air as you reach out to me. I draw away unsure about why it should still matter. My eyes fold away their frosted shield and you realize that the hurt flickering there is you. You face your own fingers, courage dead to you and pluck clutched in the hidden corners of your hand. We breathe in space, the Beauty and the Beast, counting colours in our head.

“I will always love you as a person”, you say, answering the questions burning through my skin, questions you recognize as your own as skin kisses skin. 

Your fingers curl hesitantly through mine and the friction is almost tangible. Your shoelaces lie enticingly, intertwined but not tied.
“I know”, I say as I pull away gently, “I always have.”

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Have you ever gift wrapped the truth with a lie?
I just did.

And we walk through walls

They say that if someone makes you cry, they’re not worth your tears.
Your ghost still roams the cobwebbed corners of my mind, my love. He feeds on my fragility and soars through my mind when it is screamingly obvious that I have sealed it shut. I know he is you. He has your eyes and your hands and his voice sends shivers down my spine just like yours did. I am in love with a shadow. Yours. You don’t care but I don’t have the strength to murder your ghost. Do they ever die?
I will look for an exorcist.
Just..not yet.
I’m not ready.
What if you make yourself cry, are you worth anything at all?

Through the Looking Glass

I know this is where I rant about how much I hate you,
how you left me out in the cold with the knifes’ edge of your words cutting down my spine, how you made me want you only to saunter off into the horizon---a figment of my imagination.
But the bite marks have faded. And the irony of the situation is that inspite of it all,
I pity You.
Your bandaids litter the glass walls you have confined yourself in and as you sit there picking at the scars, watching the blood flow through your fingers I can’t help but help.
You’ve scratched at my scabs and here I am piecing you together again.
You’ve slipped through your own cracks and I can’t stand by and watch.
I can’t.
But then again, I’m just speculating.
Maybe you’re happier this way, better off.
And maybe these glass walls have been put up for a reason.
And maybe, just maybe they’re not to hold you in, but to keep me out.