I could not stop thinking about her perfectly fabricated lips dancing up and down whispering silent love lullabies as the night shrank to just us laying under a canopy of fireflies.

One airplane ride I crunched my face together to stop myself from crying as I wrote prose about her that I knew she would never read, my darling. I was in a one sided love affair built on doubt.

She makes me feel everything and nothing at all. She is with me but never there. She reassembles me into a contradictory mess, like the word life contradicts itself because as soon as one arrives into the world, they are living this miraculous journey to their death.

So each word that spills out of me, I leave for someone to sip up again, maybe a little more whole, or empty, but as long as someone receives my carbon thought copies, I am fine. I am not. I pray whoever comes across the carcasses of my love story will pass it on, to her.

Maybe I’ll be gone by then, so I don’t have to see her horrified reaction and experience deep regret.

But maybe I want to stay to be the arms she comes running into.