the air around me still feels like a cage

It’s been three years, and I can’t fall asleep without a little help.

You sang ballads like lullabies and I never forgot how your hands were always so careful. You were rain and the sound of the door closing. You were broken bones and broken promises and broken mind and you never let me hold it all in my palms. You were the poetry you never wrote, I never read, we never shared. You were the hurricanes you kept inside you, with your fingertips ever so slightly electrifying. You were the colourless skies, drowning in greyscale seas. We were capsizing boats and free-falling bodies, so nonchalant of our bruises. We were the Memphis blues, in song and in gazes; we were music in silent places.

You pulled me out of fake eternities and we ran spirals into sorrow and the walls were echoes of every word we never meant. Clawing at innocence, haunting peripheral vision, running away. You snuffed your thirst for arson on my skin. I don’t know what I bled for — your impromptu whims or everything that you killed in me. But you were searching touch in dim lights and grim sights. You were strength in arms and fear in eyes.

You were cowardice and ambiguity and callous and doom and conceit and hope and accusations and pretense and delusion and insecurity and denial and gone and you were gone you were gone and every ceiling screams lies at me and you were gone you were always fucking gone.

You crumbled at my feet. You were all the lives kept out of my reach.

I was lost and found, you were infinite.

Originally published at mirroredblack.wordpress.com on June 2, 2016.