I'm not browbeat about it, not really.

I may be oblivious, but thats willful. I know. I always know. I'm always right.

And that isn't a nod to my ego, because I wish for a second I could believe what a person says, versus what their eyes are telling me.

So, I am willingly oblivious. Willingly ignorant. Knowing, but not wanting to see.

But a persons intentions, their heart, their soul— it lurks like a wading creature behind the iris. I've seen fae, florals and fawn behind the eyes of a friend that is so genuine and loving. Seen an angel shackled to something blearing in the dark in the eyes of someone who smiles but it never reaches. Seen what I can imagine nirvana is in the eyes of a lover.

Some peoples eyes are so hollow, though, so empty, and that might be crueler then seeing a prowling beast waiting to lunge. Because at least that is hatred. That is passion. But nothingness? To be so completely indifferent? That is the complete absolution of a person's soul. Being selectively empathic, and horribly fake to bide your time.

So when this girl, with nothing behind her eyes leaves with fallacies on her tongue and little to nothing in regard to a person's very soul, no, I cannot act shocked. I cannot be saddened. I will rejoice, that the nothingness didn't take from my own myriad of vision.

You don't know me.

My nervous system doesn't light up by you the way it has for all three of my greatest loves.

I register your messages the same as I do water. Cool. Centered. Fine. Even annoyed when it takes too long.

And then I see you, and something in me stutters to a halt. Like eyes that blink too quickly in still air. Like a heart caged that finally has someone that presses against the bars without knowing, with practiced apprenhension but sloppy execution.

You sound like a club late at night, when the fog machines are cloying and the lights are too much and I'm too bleary-minded to know left from right.

You say something spectacularly starting, candid and genuine.

It should annoy me. You say I'm crazy, but you say it with a quiet knowing.

You say I am not normal, but you say it with familiarity.

You say I am strange but say it like you know, like you can see through me without ever having met me.

And I loathe the idea. I loathe you, quietly, while I profess I like you in the quiet way I do.

It is strange. It is unknown, and for some reason, my defences have raised higher than they ever have for someone since the great three.

Perhaps it is because we are the complete opposite. You are slow in action, and I am all motion. You are private while I spill my guts and hope you find it to lay prettily. You don't answer for hours and I think about it for days.

Perhaps it is because I know we will never work, and yet I pray to God that we do.

I hiccup. Face on my fist and eyes unfocused on the psychedelic lights twisting into swirls and blobs on the tv in its looped glory. I don’t think of you all night except for now. And it is an exceptional feat not to, when for months, you are all that has occupied me despite the years apart. It’s nice not to think of you, but to not think of you means I’m uncomfortably drunk and lost my bottle of water and some man has danced up to me asking if I also enjoy such an exercise and when I emphatically says no, he shimmies his apology. For asking, or for me not liking dancing I do not know. My friend is waiting for our next round of drinks. I yearn. I want. I hope. I dream. Listen to the rave music hurting my nervous system and drink liquor that does nothing to quell it. I'll talk to the girls in my phone who look nothing like you and can no longer distract from you either, and later I'll ask my tarot deck if this is divine timing coming in to play or if I need my medications adjusted.

Tenderness does not dissolve.

A decade ago I told you I would stay. I would wait. I would come if you called, and no one could ever replace you.

I've said those same words a dozen times by now. But I never meant it like I do now. Like I feel them.

A tugging ache in my chest; a tether or a string humming from the roots of my hair to the skin of my teeth.

I look too quickly to the side and I am flash banged by your smile.

I haven't seen it in years. But I know it, bone deep like a sun burn.

You told me a decade ago you didn't want me to waste my life waiting.

Oh, but how is it a waste when it's you?

When I was made to love you, and to be the very thing you hated, too?

No, tenderness does not dissolve. It consumes itself until it is a hundred times the size.

And I hold it, like I'll hold you should you ever come back.

Bloodied, beaten and bruised, I would use my last breath to ask to hold you.

For I haven't earned the right, but I should like to try.

I think. I think hard. I think of the women I've met. Vaguely found attractive. Kissed. Dated. Thought of marrying and raising a family. I think of you.

I sip my drink, and its lemon is as bitter as the facts. You’re happy. You are in love. You won’t come back.

In my dreams you return. You’re not desperate and needy, which at a point was all I wanted in a relationship. Someone to control and to manipulate. But that is no longer me, and that is something you would hate me for.

You’re you. Strong, stubborn and confident. You come to me out of annoyance that I won’t leave your thoughts. Out of a need to make it stop. You hate taking to me. You never wanted to again. But talking to me is a reprieve you haven’t had in years. A release. You talk to me and you feel as safe and as unnerved as I always used to leave you. Safe because I’d never truly hurt you. Unnerved because I am constantly riding a wave of emotion that leaves you spinning on the spot trying to follow.

You like me. You hate me. It’s familiar and pleasant and discomforting.

But you’d have to disrespect yourself a little more. Hate yourself more, to speak to me again. You don’t. So I am a memory. A vague shadow that doesn’t draw or repel. Just exists as a thing in the very back of your mind like a task you don’t really have to do, but if you feel like it you can. Like cleaning a corner of a closet. I will collect dust; but it won’t ever matter. You won’t see it or think of it and it won’t inconvenience you.

How nice that must be, my personal poltergeist.

The thing about never getting over anything in your life, is that eventually,

everything becomes a mass.

A mass of memories that hurt, that are nostalgic.

I can smell forty different perfumes, and they will each belong to someone different but belong to the same feeling.

Everyone I have loved and lost becomes an amalgamation with no specific person to tether my longing to.

And I am empty and chasing something that I miss but I can't remember..

I stare the mosaic of myself. The pieces belonging uniquely to every person that has ever mattered to me. Their sizes vary, their brilliance softer or harder— but all there. I want to pat it like a man does his dog. Fond and with pride, though I am hard-pressed to ever admit it out loud.

I look at the biggest piece. The one that reflects myself back the clearest. I think of who this one belongs to— green like the ring around her eyes, strong and stubborn despite the whirlwind storm it was caught in. It has some cracks on its edges where errant debris struck, but it remains whole. Annoyingly. Angrily. It holds my entire teenage career in it. The person who broke and built and mended and moulded me.

I've taken a sledgehammer to it, but it never shattered. Didn't even splinter when I casted the first stone. All I could feel was the tears in my eyes and the rage in the curl of my lip and the discomforting silence.

Because every curator in this museum of me has left. And I have no one to blame but myself, as I am confronted by the image each time I am caught in this envy-green mirror.

I will never love anyone the way I love you.

Coincidentally, I will never hate someone as much as I hate you.

I wil never be made so sick. So stuck in the past because you refuse to give me the closure I am owed.

And yet I love you, because my heart is far larger than my brain. Far more foolish, and far more forgetful.

I place my head in my hands and squeeze.

I can remember it all so painfully well. Like I'm being haunted.The little hands of my subconscious push the memories up, up, up until I am choking around them: little fettered ghosts dancing on my tongue.

It pushes until my eyes blur and my ears ring and I can't tell who I am anymore.

Blonde hair becomes brown, skin is absolved of ink, clothes shrink and eyes brighten.

But I remain painfully, solidly in real time while my mind is consumed by madness.

I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in this purgatory of memories, hazy from time and furled at the edges from where I have picked at it so many times.

I become tormented with the people in them— people I know I no longer know, but who seem to be able to equate me at seventeen to me at near twenty-four.

Because they can change, but I can't.

I can't feel guilt, or remorse, or shame. I couldn't possibly— which is why I've apologized to them for things I didn't actually do, and why when I hear the same tired old spindle of lies that were tagged to me in my teens I fall apart.

But they change. So I search for them everywhere I can.

I re-read messages that are bitterly adolescent and co-dependent, and type their names into every site I can think of. Their parents. Siblings. My eyes read through their profiles, while my mind produces the grainy memory of being persecuted for loving a girl and for needing help. For being young and abused and scared.

They're doing well. Present, and not lost in their own purgatory where I block the doors and drive them to the point of obsession.

I want to cry. Scream. Bang pots together, become famous, need paramedic aid because thats what they do— anything to get their attention. Prove they don't know me and they're wrong— I succeeded. I did well. I am good.

The voice that belongs to the little hands hums a disagreement.

Because I didn't use to obsess over them. I didn't care for them again until I was twenty one and spoke to them again and one of them called me special. Her first love. Someone she would care about from very far away.

Oh, the one. The one that forces me to only date carbon copies of her to this day because I am incapable of finding anyone else interesting, or its my younger self trying to finish the story that was interrupted by cruel adults and a crueler religious institution.

I say her name less as a prayer and more of a plea. To wonder why when she was between relationships she looked at my profile two years ago. To wonder if she is ever haunted, too.

And people keep telling me talking to them now can't fix what happened to me then, because they now aren't the ones that hurt the me from now. They can't undo the abuse they caused. They will forever pretend they did nothing wrong.

But I have a hole in my chest that fit the pair of them perfectly. Nothing else will fill it.

I have tried. Oh, I have tried everything I can. Self inflicted suffering and an abundance of self love and indulgence. But it only irritates the wound worse when it reopens.

So once a year, I become haunted.