My heart was left standing in the pouring rain. Alone.

When people leave, 

she thinks,

 when people leave,

they cut out a sliver of me and place it in their lockets.

~0O0~

I dreamed of my loneliness the night before you left. She was faded, like I was staring at her through the rain. Her smile was faded, too, sad. She reached out with slow fingers ad I woke up before she could touch me. I knew a sliver of my heart was gone. I knew. you leave, and my heart is smaller for it. 

There is something distant about feeling happy. Like it is happening to a stranger. Like it only happens in the movies. Too tight clothes, fleeting. You won't ever know it again if you don't grab on to it quick enough. I too was too slow. I was too slow. Now i settle comfortably in my pain. It caresses me in places ecstasy cannot. Maybe i have never felt quite so alive until i feel the familiarity of the hurt wrapping around me like an old friend. One that stayed. I will fall in love with anything that lingers. I will fall in love with anything that touches me long enough.

And  I think i change a little more when they leave. I hold a vigil by candlelight and press bluebells to the shrine of who i used to be before the caress of loss. I mourn who i used to look like. I feel glad she is gone. My heart is too small for everything she used to feel. But i am not alone, not so long as i have my words. My heart-shaped bandages. My memories that make me feel as though i am wearing the skin of a stranger.

I dreamt again; my loneliness pushed a paper boat in a pond towards mine. Bobbing, steady. They brush bodies, exchange glances, then pass by. All the emotion my little heart cannot hold rises like the moon in my throat. I am now forced to swallow it down. She splinters into seven shards for the seven times i was left behind. They make my heart bleed the light of every wish i never gave wings.

But i have always been a good liar. I have been drenched in hurt and blessed with a tongue dipped in moonlight. I have taught myself to believe that writing away my incomplete pain will let it seep into paper so it isn't mine anymore. my wanting is cold; my hands colder.

I am tired of it. The leaving. I'm tired of knowing the ending of every chapter of every person i meet. I tie red strings around my littlest finger but when i reach to knot the other end, i am met not with warm hands, but silence. Emptiness. They are already gone. I am left holding a red thread that i slowly spool back around my wrist.

 Abandoned. 

Too slow.

~0O0~