It makes me sick to think of what you do to me. I’m quite aware of the hold you have; the tight, strong grip around my lungs, and my stomach, makes it hard to breathe, and hard to speak… and hard to be without you. When I caught you with another girl, at the small mostly abandoned coffee shop by your apartment, I brushed it off, because I thought the assumption that you were two-timing me was jumping to conclusions. After all, you were allowed to have friends. I wasn’t in the right to stop you. On my way to your place to drop by a little earlier than I’d told you I’d be there, I noticed you sitting by the window, as I passed by the cafe, and you didn’t notice me stop, and watch you in slight disbelief. I didn’t duck out of view, or hide myself because I wanted you to look through the dirty glass, so that maybe you could see the hurt that I was feeling. Maybe next time, you’d drop the girl and come sit outside with me. I’d be waiting with a large coffee to share between us, because I knew that plain, straight black coffee was a favorite that we both had in common. One of the only things we had in common.

But then you leaned in and kissed the girl. I was still in my place outside the window, and you finally did look up at me and gaze for a moment or two, before coming outside to yell and scream. I didn’t trust you, you yelled, I was a stalker, I could never let go and leave you alone, this was why you needed…space. And even after all of that, you followed me home and I let you. I let you sit in my living room, sit on my couch, even lie in my bed beneath the covers while your fingers traced the invisible lines across the skin of my lower back, and your eyes traced the completely visible lines that were etched across my forehead from the stress I never seemed to be able to get rid of. That was how we spent our time. We had nothing to talk about because you kept your emotions bottled up inside, except for little blow-ups after you blamed me when you screwed something up. I was all about the talking and the expression, because I wanted to be able to be open with you, and I wanted you to trust me enough that you knew you could share anything with me. That was never going to happen if you couldn’t stay in the same room with me if we weren’t having sex.

There was one morning where you left my house at around five in the morning without saying goodbye. And I remember being so upset, and so frustrated at the fact that I clearly didn’t mean enough to you that you couldn’t even stay until the sun came up, that I lay beneath the thin sheets just wasting the hours away, staring at the ceiling and forcing myself not to cry, because I knew you weren’t worth it. The way you treated me made it obvious that you weren’t worth it. Once I was finally able to get up and out of the bed, I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and tried to drown you in the heavy jet stream shooting from the shower head. I scrubbed at my skin until it was red and blotchy from both the heat of the water, and the force I was using to cleanse myself.

I wanted to wash every part of you out of my consciousness. I wanted your intoxicating, sweet stench out from it’s constant home beneath my nostrils and swept away down the drain, and up the vents with the rest of the steam. When I finally emerged from the water and wiped the fog away from the bathroom mirror with a towel, I could still feel you with me. Your smile had yet to evaporate, but the very memory of you made me shake with anger and disgust. Shaking, as though there were an earthquake, and the building was going to come tumbling down around me. Just as you had.