you poured your heart out to me, all of it (but even then i wanted more than your heart. i wanted your childhood secrets, broken promises, teenage philosophies). it flooded the space between our eyes, autumn honey and cherry wine and rich coffee, and i gobbled it up and gave nothing back, nothing but my silent exhilaration. i listened deeply to everything you didn't say. your beauty is so piercing, it seems to have cut my tongue off.

i am not sure if you left or i left but someone did and now it doesn't matter. my tongue is still cut off, my belly is about to burst, and now i have this ocean of passion and nowhere to pour it back into. so i'm drowning now. i can't scream for help. i open my mouth and i am a wound.

i am drowning but my feelings won't die-- i feed them with memories, with this infatuated fever, this dream dust. i wake up tangled in your smell, the fumes caught in my throat. the bruises are forming, fresh and blooming, a garden spawned in moonlight. the curtains were open and the window shut.

so each morning i kill you. i kill you in the shower, then at the breakfast table, and then and then and then again until i come home with bloody hands and your memory still rotting in the sheets. i've buried you, but you're a ghost. not there. there. and not.

maybe i should've buried myself.

you are not what you should be. that's probably why i feel so lost. the first gift you ever gave me (and ever will) was a 17th century latin world map with gold clouds and krakens and mermaids. i run my fingers along the stitched meridian; i pretend its your cheekbone. when you laugh, van gogh's almond blossoms swirl in my eyes like an animation.

i remember feeling so romantic that i thought: there should be candlelight here. you pulled the snakeskin ribbon from my hair and rubbed the blue eyeshadow off my cheekbones. you called me beautiful, and i believed you. we became a storm of skin and heat. you were midnight thunder, i was autumn rain. it was mighty, it was graceful.

oh, but what do i have but my virtue? my virtue is my name. you whispered it so many times last night that it no longer feels mine.

we left it at a café corner with an empty espresso cup and a mug of vanilla latte gone cold. still printed on the rim was the lipstick that i wore for you, that you had smeared off my lips the night before. today it was smeared off by someone else. he was warmer than you. he was nothing compared to you.

mama taught me self respect but i'm in a strange and foreign land and my native strength is gone. the woman inside me has turned into a confused creature. my heart is closing into a fist, but it would still rather hurt anyone but you. i'm going to plead. come back, please. even as a shadow. even as a dream. you're a friend of darkness. i will love it for you. come back and overwhelm me. i didn't realise how numb life was. how numb i could be.