love must be playing favorites. i keep shying away from the light that i know is there. i just can’t have anything to do with anything i could lose. i always grapple with this incompleteness and i think i have grown to love its torments. i have always been too good at its game. love reveals itself to me inch by insufferable inch the longer i want you — and the more i see, the uglier it all becomes. yet i can’t stop digging my shoulders deeper, can’t stop the falling into my consciousness, letting it have its ugly way.

and so no, i don’t think love prays for everyone.

what is it, to go on living after love shows you its second face? i can’t remember a time i wasn’t scorched or that i wasn’t scorching myself — every bitter piece of me flying into the hands of the unreliable, exhilarating hands of the lover. how can i learn to love the right way when every breath inside this space feels like being granted divinity? admit it; you think me a god. god. this will never end for me. i will always love someone as if i am dying.

and what can be the difference between you and desire? it is the same concept. don’t you understand that i am a whole person and loving a whole person means eating your fill too many times? i am so sick and it is disheartening to witness my fall. i have loved you, a third of a person that you are, season by season. and every season it has grown worse, turned dark, grown bitter, grown lovelier and i am sick of it. i think of you as the lightest part of me, but i ache for you so deeply, in a dark way. and showing you what’s in my eyes is unimaginable.

hey. so love was sitting across from me at the dinner table one day telling me to get ready, and what made me even hungrier was the fact that i was not hungry but that it came to me at a time i hadn’t come home rummaging through the kitchen, aching for scraps as i did. i hadn’t come home yearning for so long and maybe that’s why it flitted through my closed window somehow, wanting me because i hadn’t wanted it. i want to gather every morsel of what’s inside you take it in my hands and consume it, understand you, really, because inside i have no clue what you’re made of.

do i have to go as far as love will take me or can i resist it? i am weak not because i don’t know how to turn back but because i can turn back but i will not.

love gives me some sour look across the room, watched as i asked my lover to play god for me, watched how i put the task on him but asked him to never come near me to not see me. i wanted that specific religion and that specific god in which i believed in neither. i did love you but i could not believe in you.

i’ve been flinching from its hard gaze, the expectation as it leaves me. sometimes i say your name in the dark and things quiet just a little almost as if pressing back, still? still? so you still feel this way? one day really, i want to utter your name, have it move across the planet trying to slither its way back to me only to find that this time it cannot make an impression. one day your name will move nothing inside me, one day my feelings for you won’t be delivered by the way i avoid the press of your eye.

my little quiet vanity asking you to take my hand with as little words as possible. you are so beautiful you are like colored glass and i can’t confront you because then i am always looking at me, am always looking into my eyes and asking her to be better.

what if i leave the love where it is and it grows unattended, that it gets worse for me and better for you? i mean in the sense that i grow more desperate, fall more in love, and better for you in the sense that you realize it? that you realize your power? i want you to understand your effect on me and at the same time shrivel away from the thought. the problem is we are fighting not to show each other, though you are horrible at it. the problem is that you are like a piece of rage in my shoulder blade that i can’t shut out. love is supposed to be peace! and that is still what i yearn for. and maybe i can cut it out of you, make you give that to me by fighting you. there must be some shard of peace, some shred of knowledge you have of giving it to a girl.

what if i always believe in you but it’s the wrong thing? this ugly thought — how you are so perfect and how i know that means you will stay away from me. a wicked thought.

i keep going away from myself to see if it hurts, at what point it will start to ache, and i am scared every time it doesn’t. i am more scared that i am trying to erase her.

you walked in so cool, so cold, and maybe it was nothing to you but i, i couldn’t eat, i was sick to my stomach, my hands could draw ice, the back of my neck where you stood behind me began to burn though i didn’t have even one solid moment with your eyes. how could love still claim to know me after all this time? though it won’t touch me in crowded places with so many souls even still i can feel your influence. right behind the wing of my shoulder, hovering unbearably.

i have let your name grow have let it mean something and now i can’t kill it. it is not that i am afraid of love or trying to turn away from it, but that it has caught me on the coolest wire that i have been trying to detangle myself from, trying to let it go only to find for the first time that i am unable to

i always look at their hands now; no one will ever have hands like that no matter who it ends up being. why do i tell myself i am loveless for the sake of knowing what comes next? for the sake of knowing at least how it will end?

trying to stop it from spreading. my mind is in fact plaguing every good thing right now and ‘i can be happy with this brain,’ i recite and recite — i am trying to be as good as i can after loving the wrong thing.

it’s just that i run away and you stand so still doing nothing, and that i believed in you while you stood there. i thought you were facing me. after all this time of creating you softly in my dreams, stitch by stitch, detail by detail, my good eye incapsulating it all, every insignificant thing. and you watched me from the sidelines and would not join me. and writing about it will help. two years from now, five years from now i will have the art, the good art; and i will not have the pain. and that is all i can ask for.