foolish humans.

Say sorry, I can’t. It doesn’t make sense.

It’s like the feeling of walking down the stairs with missing steps, or having your life flash before your eyes all the time - even when you’re not dying. It’s me, wondering if you’ll never speak to me again after this conversation.

Say have you ever seen a horror movie? Not the ones with blood and gore, or the ones where the stereotypically weak female actress gets left behind with the murderer and a hammer. The ones where the entire family’s house is invaded by strangers, where every second is the second between this life and the afterlife. The ones with jump scares. Say, I’m terrified most of the rest of my life will be a jump scare. That my life is a movie theater for the time being and I’m so scared you have to sit next to me during it.

There will always be the people who get it, and the people who don’t. There will always be the people who take one look at you when you try to explain and think irrational, out of control, naive, silly. Childish. But then there are the people who will understand, who will realize - Oh, this is just a survival mechanism.

And the first people will be the ones who push you down those stairs with the missing steps. And the second people who will be the ones who lead you to another staircase.

And one day you’ll wake up, and get to the bottom of the stairs. And you’ll think somebody fixed the steps, because you didn’t notice the gap where some of the steps were missing.

No matter how good the rain smells when it passes through town, don’t open your mouth. Don’t drink the thing that could drown you if you had too much of it; you’ve already spent months practicing the same thing with him. Feed the cat even when lifting the bowl to the counter feels like lifting the world. Remember how it feels to be a starving thing, to lap at the basin of love you already knew was draining. To try to fill your tongue with it like milk.

He doesn’t think of you. He’s at the bar with another girl right now. He’s leading her up the stairs. They’ve had too much to drink, one too many rounds for the whole table. An extra spin on the roulette wheel.

There’s a name for this: they call it the love hangover. On the first day you forget that the night before he told you it was over. On the second day you go through life like a wounded thing, so blinded by the loss that it throbs like a migraine in your temples. And my god, how you want to inhale more to stop the shaking. You’d wipe the blood off his teeth and swallow it if you could taste him one more time.

There’s no salt or lime to freshen this. Remember the days you went hunting with your father in the woods, how he felled the deer and skinned it, guts dropping from its insides like pearls. You couldn’t bear the stench for days after; it followed you through the halls. Remember how the deer’s eyes looked up at you, almost like pleading, almost like asking for mercy, as the bullet danced.

He left the bullet in you too. Silver, deep like an arrow. Replaying the memories will only twist it deeper. Hoping he’ll show up will only make it harder to knife out.