She died without knowing I love her. I mean, it was pretty obvious, for all the time we'd spent together, the dates and the movies and the pets. We'd spent almost two thirds of our lives together. It's almost impossible she didn't know I loved her.

But, all the same, I never said it, aloud, with words or voice or hoarse whispers. I'm trying desperately to remember saying it; it's driving me up the wall. What kind of girlfriend am I to have never said "I love you" in the fifteen years we'd known each other?

What kind of girlfriend was I.

My brain is starting to spiral, as I fall further and further into the catacombs of my mind, destroying any kind of order or sense in trying to find any moment, any small murmur or whisper where I had told her, goddammit, I should have told her. Everyday, every minute I was with her, I should have yelled the words from the balcony at interstate traffic in front of our apartment building, carved it into our door like a fucking talisman to ward off bad luck, said it in the funny accents that made her laugh and then said it for real before kissing her so hard on the mouth she wouldn't be able to breathe with how much I loved her.

Well, the not being able to breathe part is accurate at least. Now it is, anyways.

Somewhere in me, I know she knew. She said it all the goddamn time, and while I never said it back out loud, I did do a hundred things that must have showed her I loved her. Buying her favorite jam and putting it on her toast after a particularly rough night. Rubbing her feet during rainstorms. Paying the Netflix bill. Stuff like that. Small, ordinary stuff that I wouldn't do for anyone else in the world except for maybe my family, and only then with some severe whining.

I never whined for her. God, I would have walked over coals barefoot just for a dinner date with her.

I would certainly do that now, and more. But it doesn't matter what I'd do for her now, because she no longer has a "now." The only "now" she has is, "Oh yeah, her? She's dead now." I would give her my "now" in a heartbeat, if I didn't so selfishly want to keep her away from this kind of pain.

Maybe it wouldn't have been as bad for her, if the situation were reversed. She knew that I knew she loved me. That was a solid, irreversible fact. Or maybe that just would have made it harder.

God, I hope she knew.

Take away feeling;

Give them hearts of stone.

Let them build their towers

All alone.

Bury their homes into the ground,

Let them adapt to darkness

And never be found.

Sins,

Sins,

Take them away.

Let from the sky fall

Acid rain.

The harshest conditions

Shall not surrender to them.

They shall surrender to the earth

From which their bones were made.

Steal from them

All things sweet;

Let them forget the texture

Of meat.

There is no God

To watch over them now;

No God to blame.

Each disaster

Shall be a disaster woven from

Their own fingers;

Each disaster

Their own creation.

If they should fall,

Let them hit the ground.

Only the toughest

And most grateful

Will survive. 

“Hey, get out fast, Har. I needa get ready for an event!”

Harry Jackson stood stiffly in the middle of his sister’s room, clenching and unclenching his fists as if trying to consider what he should or should not do. With his sturdy body, towering height and tanned skin, it was hard to think of him as anything but an extremely muscular young man. He had carefully styled hair, short at the back and long at the front, combed to the right side of his face. His facial features, however, had a touch of surprising softness in them, causing him to look slightly odd. Harry shifted uncomfortably, then sat down at his sister’s makeup table.

Harry looked at the jumble of makeup tools on the table with a rising sickness in his gut, not because he hated them, but because he was somehow afraid of them. He had never thought he would be sitting at this table looking at all the cosmetics. It should have been his sister, the owner of this room, this table, this chair and everything surrounding him. Certainly, it would have made more sense if she was the one looking at all the makeups, considering which lipstick to apply or which perfume to wear. Instead, he felt like an outcast. Harry reached his hand out and fixed a lipstick that was not facing the right direction, shyly, as if he was afraid of getting caught. It was the first time he had done something like this, although he must have randomly occupied his sister’s room for a million times.

On the other hand, Harry liked the cosmetics just as much. He liked the scarlet Chanel lipstick carefully chosen by his sister when he took her on a surprise eighteenth birthday, the Lancôme perfume she insisted on buying during their trip to France two years earlier, even the old Sephora mascara she had stopped using for what felt like a dozen years. Harry stared vacantly at the table, images running through his muddy brain in slow-motion. He could see his sister getting a lovely flower bouquet on her seventeenth birthday, precisely a hundred and seventy roses, red ones forming a heart in the center and white ones bracing the outside. He could see his mother doing a perfect winged eyeliner for his sister on the day of her senior prom, using solely an old, dried-out liquid eyeliner. He could also see him standing helplessly in the gigantic Louis Vuitton shop, trying to pick the most elegant handbag for his sister, at the same time wondering who would deserve the chance to use the bag if it weren’t to be her.

“Knock-knock,” the simultaneous sound of knocking and voice from the outside startled him, causing him to jump a little. He turned his head back, perhaps a little too hastily. “Har, your sister is getting impatient. I think she needs to get ready for something.”

Harry recognized his mother’s clear and sonorous voice, the one that he had always loved and feared. Three. Six. Nine. Twelve. Some umpteen seconds.

“Har, you alright? You’ve gotta come out, dear!”

Silence. Harry didn’t answer, not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t know how to. It was just a simple question, as simple as “Are you going to have dinner with us?”, or “How was school today?”, but for Harry, it felt extremely loaded. He shifted his eyes to the right side of the door, and there she was, framed on the wall–his sister, standing in her brocade tank top and designer jeans–the one that perfectly accentuated her waist and revealed her shapely legs. The Chanel sunglasses hanging loose on her dazzling brunette hair. A sudden, sharp pain hit him too severely he had to double over.

“Harry, I know you are in there. Will you please open the door? For goodness sake!”

Impatience. Harry could detect impatience in his mother’s sentences. Oh God. He thought to himself. His body started to shiver, even though it was in the middle of July and the sun was showing off the best it could.

“Harry, you cannot lock yourself in there forever. Please get out and we can talk about it, okay?” His mom begged one more time–perhaps the last time, he thought–and Harry could hear the desperation in her voice. He closed his eyes and turned back to the mirror on top of the makeup table, his face painted plainly with discomfort and fatigue–that of a soldier fighting an endless moral battle.

Harry sighed, and when he opened his eyes, tears welled up. He mumbled something to himself, breathlessly but with a newly adopted confidence from the decision he had just made. He grabbed the Chanel lipstick and looked at it intently, his hands fumbled; the cap felt strangely heavy on his palm.

After a few seconds, he stood up, took one last breath, fixed his sagging shoulders and walked away without turning back. The door slowly opened and Harry thought he had never felt more naked.

It's cruel to be kind

to Love Unrequited

She hears promises in your lies

She sees beauty in your blackened heart

She's sewing hope into your jagged edges

Instead

Say nothing, deny her existence

Disappear like morning fog

Flaunt your newfound happiness

Until you're transformed

Heart's desire.....

Now bittersweet memories

I'm not sure if it's raining

Or hailing

But

This storm is raging

Outside

and inside

I've put your words on a stick, so I can cook your thoughts over the burning of my need as it flickers like a serpent tongue licking air.

Drinking in the light bouncing off your face, I brace my throat for the tickle, and I wonder how bitter my gut will burn at the embrace.

You slide down smooth, like childhood memories as they're made; nothing can prepare me for the reaction of the beast in me as it consumes you.

You feel like lust set in stone along the edges of my sanity, framing fences to keep logic in the structure of desire stretching true.

My fingers itch at at the tip as though not having you is an infection I can't treat with the remedies in my mind.

Breath gives out at the graze, overriding my instincts as I descend into the riddle of pain and healing as they battle will.

Nothing can prepare a man for his undoing, when he chooses to ignore the cause of virtue decaying into promises made unaware.

All my statements float on wind currents circling the edges of your ear, and you don't know where I've been before.

Inside the exchange of you and me, neither of us know how deep the trail leads, but we must walk.

Our feet tread on mistakes acting as tripwires laid by malicious hands, always seeking blood to water the pores.

I'll save you from it; you may not see, but I promise you will feel me trying.

I promise you will feel the heat, dripping hot from future scars before they scab and shrink.

They are fresh, newly acquired lacerations, you press your hand to slow the spread of sacrifice.

It might get harder to ignore the signs that speak of tragedy waiting in ambush.

We can face them together, somehow joined tighter than either of us had originally planned.

Our vision, limp from exhaustion, can't see clearly to navigate through the thorns.

We will both look like nightmares by the time this is over.

You say that you prefer it this way enough to try.

I reach for meaning in the air of your tongue.

You can taste my blood when I find it.

It tastes like tomorrow arriving before it should.

Let's just not answer; forget the knocks.

They ring ugly through the door.

We refuse to answer it.

We say a prayer.

You say goodbye.

I burn.

Farewell.