i loved you because it was easier than loving myself.

Even though I knew how it felt to love someone with a heart like the sharp edge of a knife, I pulled out the whetstone. I asked you to bend, to be small enough to close my fist around. I wanted to be certain you could never get away. I knew there was someone else, but I started looking through your pockets for proof I was wrong. I threw a wine glass across the kitchen like a fastball, we both stood and stared at the shattered glass, proof that good people do terrible things. I said “I love you" when I meant something much more specific, I should have said “Please don’t leave me, I’m afraid to sleep alone.

“If I were to send you a letter, this would be it” I guess this could be both a goodbye and a hello a soft goodbye because I know this letter marks the last time you will ever think of me And a hard hello because you cannot simply fathom the amount of missing you that has taken place In this hollow heart of mine. Because every night I discover you in a new and brilliant way Your name is painted in a delicate red under the tight seams of the wallpaper I put up after you left. The ripped up poetry pages you kept are still in my trash can since it has not yet been a full week Since I destroyed every physical memory of you. The roses you bought me which were intended to help stifle the pain of our breakup only renew it in the most hateful way possible. Obviously I still think of you though You are the chemical ingredients which make me feel miserable You are the cracks in my bones which grow with every passing hour You are the hour, the minute and the second hand Always chipping away at the few hours of sanity I have left. And you are the rose petals in my tea Marking the death of another far off love that couldn’t have been quite as extraordinary as ours. Yet I find myself thinking If I could just let go of all of these things then maybe Just maybe, I can let go of you too. So I have decided to leave to leave this apartment which is only a graveyard of short-lived memories And to move to another country And maybe then I will finally be happy. I will write more and read more, paint and take more photographs, and hopefully fall in love, one last time. But if that makes you sad just know this; I will still find you in some way, whether it be the touch of the cold rain or silent kiss of soft snow or even the whisp of sheets which surround me as I sleep And it will be these moments, these soft goodbyes and hard hellos Which I will live for When my next lover becomes eternally reckless with my crystal heart.