Self-love

They tell you to love yourself and then set you free in a world where you meet people that steal – thieves, robbers, boys in black who smell musky and know all the right words to make you collapse into their arms until you forget the girl you’re looking at in the mirror. And what happened to her.

Learning to love you was one thing. That happened in days – one look and I melted into the chocolate pool of your eyes. But learning to love who I was –something else entirely. A battle I’d been fighting for as long as my fragmented mind would let me.

And that love that I had saved up for myself – I held it out to you and you snatched it away from me. You emptied it out into the ocean; let the tide drag it away until I couldn’t reach it anymore, not even with the tips of my fingers, those that you used to kiss with your lying lips. I’ll love you forever. And no matter how much I begged, the waves never came back quite the same after that day. You left me empty. Hollow inside, like the glass vases I used to fill with roses you bought me. The roses were gone and the vase broke and my skin was as transparent as the splinters of glass I watched slip and slide across the floor through the bitter blur of my tears.  You threw rocks at me until my heart was stained with bruises. That wall of self-confidence that I had been building up for so long crumbled, crashed to the ground. And I was suffocated under the bricks, gasping for help, but you couldn’t hear me. At least that’s what I like to tell myself because that way I can at least pretend that you care.

Because sometimes I can still hear the echo of your laughter, because I guess it must be kind of funny, mustn’t it? How something that takes an eternity to collect can be stolen away in a single second. I don’t know if it was your mistake for taking it or mine for letting you but, either way; the love that I had saved for myself is gone. And I can’t get it back.