melancholy

A Poem About How Trying to Break Your Heart Broke Mine Instead

Painting by John Tarantola

The night I broke your heart
My sadness was as deep as the snow
Wine gave me warmth
Back then, I was kissing bottles more often that your lips.
How do you tell the person you love
That their presence gives you anxiety?
That your depression is greedy and doesn’t like to share
That a knock at the door starts your heart with fear
That the bed where your first declarations of love were spoken
Has become a prison.

How do you make them understand
That you don’t understand why they love you?
That their feelings have become too intense
That you don’t deserve affection
That you hate every inch of the body they adore
That the only friends worthy of company are razor blades
And cigarettes. So many cigarettes.

How do you vocalize
That all you want is to leave yourself?
That you would rather go out and drown yourself in alcohol
That you would rather surround yourself with strangers
Than stay home and explain
Than stay home and feel.

How do you confess to the person you want to spend the rest of your life with
That you are tainted?
That you smell of someone else’s lips
That you sought solace in another’s arms
That you wanted to be used
And you enjoyed the destruction.

How do you come to terms with the fact
That you did something so unforgivable
That sorry will never fix it?

How do you come to terms with the guilt?

You don’t.

The night I broke your heart
I went looking for trouble and found it
Only, I wasn’t trying to break your heart
I was trying to break mine.

—

Submitted to ArtParasites by Sylvie Gravelle

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