the space above my ears.

The Ballad of Someone Who Didn't Say it Back

Your hands are lost.

With your elbows rested on your knees, they hover inches away from your eyes

You thought they had seen it all; you were wrong.

They well up with tears, blurring the setting before you.

They are protecting you, yet simultaneously building another stupid parallel.

You sit against a wall in the quiet, the whole right side of your body aching from the fall

It is nothing to the ache of the push, though which is out of body and beyond what words can convey.

It wasn't ill intended, just a push toward a choice.

A push to true north, away from perdition.

A sacrifice by some means, tragic and beautiful self-indulgence by others.

Your head pounds, consumed by vertigo.

You can't see for a moment, can't move, but you can hear his energy, feel it coming off him in waves.

You recover just soon enough to see your moon swallowed by the unknown along with all your handicaps.

How peaceful he looks.

How ready.

You've been here for either minutes or days but his voice in your head won't stop whispering confessions you wish you'd heard sooner.

"You changed me. I love you."

Touching the mark he left on you over and over and over.

He was real, it was here.

Unsteady knees and bloody clothes and an expression so certain that God couldn't have moved him.

But Christ, did he move you.

You're crying now - really crying - and with every tear you shed, the sinkhole in your chest devours more and more of you.

He's taken the outside parasites to hell with him, but what about the ones on the inside?

The ones flourishing, thriving in the guilt of a person who hates themself and the world too much to imagine that maybe there's more to life than making up for mistakes you never made to people that don't deserve it.

What he wanted - no, deserved - he could have had.

You could have had.

You were saved, but you thought that you'd already taken too much from the world.

You would not allow yourself this, something to fill the black hole which is constantly giving.

You would not let yourself fall into his arms and come apart even though every nerve in your body was screaming for you to let him heal you.

Let him tear you limb from limb and put you back together again.

He'd never do that, but you'd let him.

You'd let him destroy you.