Poems From My Mostly Dark Places

16. I Deserve Better

I think what kills me the most isn't the loss of everyone who's played an important role in my life the past seven years.

It isn't the knowing I've lost you and yet you still walk around while it feels like I've undergone a death.

No.

What kills me the most are moments like these. Where I'm sick and weak and all I want to do in this state is reach for the phone and call you.

Despite the knowledge that you aren't right. You aren't you. Your body will still feel the same against mine. The soul may be different, or not there at all, but you will feel like how you used to.

Especially if you hold me in a familiar way. My back pressed against your chest and your chin resting on top of my head. That's what fucks me up the most.

I know you scare me, with good reason.

All the restraint those bloody hands have shown these past years is gone. Even though you scare me, I can't help but ache for you in every moment we would normally share.

What scares me more about myself is that I've caught myself wondering if time spent with you, no matter how brief, would be worth my life.

No person should think that way. No person should be addicted to another being in such a way that makes them wonder if an early, violent death would be worth the high they get from being near.

I miss everything about you. Your hands on my hips in the shower. The smell of old spice on my skin after a long morning spent in bed. The way your chest rumbles when you whisper in my ear all the things you want from me.

I know it would be different now. Scarily different perhaps.

Maybe your hands wouldn't be at my hips but my neck instead. And perhaps a more primal metallic scent would be your cologne. But I'm sure your chest would still rumble as you told me what you would take from me.

Scarily different or not, I still want everything you are.

Monster or hero.

Sinner or saint.

I will take whatever I can get. You're my addiction and always will be.

Then I stop. And the part of me that's grown to love myself for who I am.

Imperfections and addictions galore.

She screams at me.

I don't need you. Don't deserve this.

I deserve to not think that someone's hands around my throat is romantic in a way.

I deserve to be free of fear when I'm with the one I love. Like how it used to be.

I deserve the hands on my hips in the shower. And the long mornings spent in bed.

But you don't. You don't deserve me.

You don't get to have everything I am because I'm beyond you now.

Stronger than I ever have been. And I will show everyone who doubts my strength that you, my addiction, will not and cannot control me or my fate.

So I put the phone down, ignoring the itch under my skin and in my fingers. I'll cry myself to sleep.

Detoxing from you is the worst.

But in the end, don't I deserve better?