I slip my hand beneath her shirt and feel as she gets warmer and warmer with every passing hour. I want to get impossibly closer. I tangle our limbs in a soundless dance, listen to the symphony of her laugh and hums and heart all ryhtmycailly mine.

Her perfume is stronger this way, when I touch her so softly it holds no baring to the rough, taking personalities ive known. But she's never known this type of lust. She knows only of what I give her.

Tentative hands that brush, but do not claim.

Lips that hesitate out of nerves, not out of foreboding regret.

A body that flushes from every messy, often accidental exploration.

And I want to drown in it. Bathe in the moment, and prune beneath the purity of it all.

She doesn't know yet, but when I flip onto my stomach to look at her- sleepy eyed and soft smiled, I want to tell her I love her.

My face must give it away- because I know I am useless under her unwavering attention.

But she wouldn't know, because she's never known, and everything I give her is her first. It is as unknown to me, my softness and vulnerability, as it is natural to her.

I want to promise her everything she could ever want when she kisses my temple, then chin, then bridge of my nose and corner of my mouth.

Build her a future from empty pockets and sticks.

I want to tell her I am so hopelessly in love with her, but I can't.

Because ive never known a love like this. Its my first too.

She is a piano solo. Quiet, but moving meaningfully.

She doesn't say much, but accommodates my constant moving soundlessly.

I roll over her like an idiot. I lay awkwardly, in a way painful to her.

She just wraps an arm around me and kisses me where she can reach.

She never complains. Never huffs for breath like I weigh a ton.

I nestle closer, and feel her heart beat against my ear- a symphony I wish to record.

She moves purposefully to touch me in any capacity if we're apart for longer than a minute. Her silent verse, to a chorus of loving.

I joke she only looks at me from a side glance, and oh.

She gives me the fraction of the sweetest smile, and flips fully to her side to gaze at me.

Her pupils are blown- iris' glaringly black from her affection.

She offers me the other fraction to that smile- what is this?

I studied music. She did too.

Is she a riff? A melody? What is this moment? A bridge?

I cannot place it.

Her usual laugh is sweet- her guttural laugh is that of the first woman I had imagined a future with.

She had been wrong, and mean.

But she cackles like her.

Grins like my favourite actress, speaks like her own favourite.

She is the soliloquy of those I've loved, and known.

It hurts, soothes, builds all at once.

I don't like to stare too long at myself in the mirror.

I notice the tan lines, and the shrinking of my breasts,

and I turn away.

I do not know what I look for.

Bruises that do not exist. Taut-flesh that hangs loose.

I look for some proof of what I went through.

Scars I was unfamiliar with bubble up years later under scrutiny,

and I curl a lip.

What do I have to show for this?

I know I haven't gained that much weight, or lost that much muscle, and my skin cant truly look this dull so quickly. But I see through funhouse eyes, at a genocidal body.

The moon is split in half tonight.

Straight across her belly, not lengthwise.

She is carved into, as I gaze up through speckled dying leaves and fading clouds. Like empty beer bottles shattering and clouds of smoke disintegrating.

My throat hurts. My head. My heart.

My seatbelt is partially in. It did not buckle.

I think of tea. Cold medicine. Brushed teeth and water.

I wince at the feeling of any of it hitting my smoked bovine flesh.

Raw and supple.

My left hand nestles between fat folds, the right above my hip bone. I gaze at the jagged edge in the moon. Bleary and pale in the way nothing so beautiful should be.

I feel pale.

You are the tender light beneath the stove that keeps the kitchen warm,

The one fluent in my language that I barely hold a lexicon to.

The pale crash of sea foam on rocks, and the trailing watercolour people drive out to photograph.

You are the moon flitting through parting leaves, and the moan of a well-loved bed after a long days work.

You are the orchestra to every piece of music that soothes the soul,

The divot carved from my cheek when I smile too hard, a kiss from the goddess’ above.

You are a sculptor that forms me in calloused, sure hands instead of throwing me into the kiln to burn.

You are the medicine that cures my aching throat when sick,

And the sting of a fresh tattoo that reminds me I am here.

The driftwood heart that has found me, naked and shaking, upon an isle made for me by sharp fangs and taking fingers.

But you do not take when you find me. You dress me in the finest cloth and detangle the salt from my hair with sure strokes, tentative and tender.

I bite my tongue as I read the wall of text on my phone.

Lies, lies- oh, good, a refreshing break of convoluted ideals!

I swallow against nothing, feeling the torrent of torture settle like grit,

a film on my teeth, a twinge of pain in eyelashes constantly covered with makeup.

I wonder where she thinks she gets off- but I realize it is stupid to wonder over someone with wandering eyes and ever shifting responsibility.

She dedicates songs to me I listened to in wracking sobs because of her,

tells me I manipulate all those I love into loving me, tells me I am mean and cruel,

and tops it with the crowning of the most mentally ill of our shared kind.

She knew it would land- the final blow. It is why she said it, and then tried in vain to take it back. Tells me I am good, only surrounded by enablers. That I am kind, just not to her.

I laugh. I empty my stomach contents into art. I burn it in hopes she feels the matte of ash on her fingertips- fingers that touched anyone but me. Tastes the smoke in her mouth along the spit of those she left me for.

I hollow. I rebuild. I swallow, I brush my teeth, I wash my face. All in vain to dispose of the corpse she left me with.

I trace every inch of revealed skin with a feather like brush of my fingertip, my gaze following saucer wide from smooth parchment to juniper eyes, blown so dark from their affection I can scarcely make out the ring of spring.

But I do.

And I see a flicker of a smile- tentative and new as my wandering hand that never strays from where is appropriate, because I will not ruin this. Will not ruin her. I refuse.

For once, every thing in me agrees.

Her lips quiver like my hands when we kiss, one of her firsts in her life, the only of mine to have counted for anything. And I touch. I wonder if I forget to breathe as we kiss because every time we part, and she flashes me that little nervous grin, I feel my heart pound over itself.

Perhaps this is what it is to truly love. To adore so fully. I am unsure what to do with such fidelity, such sweetness warning me in the cold of winter rather than cloying and clotting in my throat.

I wear her sweater hours after she’s gone, and the warmth of it- whatever the perfume is noted in- steeps my hurt evermore.

She smells vaguely of memory. Of something soothing and all together striking. Laughs like a best friend I once forced myself to think more of. Looks like my favourite actress. Talks like her favourite. Is the culmination of all I’ve ever wanted and so much more, because she was not made for me, but made alongside. Colliding and fusing and fissing at once.

How lucky I, to exist in a time where I would allow someone to fully devastate me.

My body is heavy as I drag it, even to sit up to type.

Drag it to my car. Drag it through work. Through emotions I'm sure I'd feel,

A mimic replicating, yet in my own flesh still.

Hopefully someone calls for a priest, or a torture, or something to make me feel like I'm myself again,

I stare at the screen- nail marks my own on my cheeks burning in the light.

I do not know how to write. Yet is has always been the only thing I've ever known.

What shall I say? What topic shall I choose?

Tapering from a medicine I've known all my sentient life?

Emotional abuse from the one I've trusted beyond all for years?

Sadness that I cannot sell my novel?

Apathy at my lack of trying?

It is not burnout. Perhaps I am jaded. Perhaps cynicism. It will wear off like a scab eventually. Until then, I have no creativity. No art. No words. Nothing important or anything to care for.

Man, am I the greatest author to exist. Wordless and mouthy like the most infamous.

I have found love a dozen times.

In a best friend, laden with familiar expectation and abuse.

In someone so traumatized they found coalescence in taking my youth.

In forcing my consent. In finding this very poetic account, spreading it among their own blood like a joke.

In sleeping amongst wolves, and claiming to be a shepherd.

I have found love, but never where it has meant to be.

A love broken and beaten and dried and shredded until its something to throw-

not in celebration, just as an add-in. Just as something. Filler.

And I have grinned and beared it.

Until I couldn't.

And then I was the villain.

A villain made of bone and little much else.

I felt like what was left inside an iron lung. A waking corpse.

Only feeling. No escape.

And once I found it- it was selfish, and cruel.

But what shall I do with bone? Clipper a clacking calcium song?

No. I will grow.

My mother always had her birthday-

the one thing my father remembered, due to his children's tentative reminders.

Her stocking was always half full, and most years she was the one to fill it.

She only did it halfway, herself, too, feeling undeserving, thanking Santa for the sake of our happiness.

Belittled by a man with a wandering eye, a cabinet filled with vases that hadn't housed flowers in twenty years.

I remedy it now. I give her an oversized stocking overflowing with love and gratitude,

flowers on every holiday, treats just because.

Some women fear their daughters will make fun of their own mother at their fathers behest,

but I am nothing like my father. I am my mother's mirror image- one that will never insult, or spout insecurity.