I never did like the way you would swing your car around those curves by my house when you drove me home in the middle of the night. I was never one to be cautious, but with you I felt like the world was rushing away and we were just speeding to keep up.

I don't like to say “we,” you know, I don't like to say “us.” But most of the time I don't know what to say – that boy and I, that thief and I, that breaker of promises, that killer of dreams, that boy outside my window when I'm trying to stay sane.

(I hate you, I think, I really do.)

You were all stubble and long legs and hands like the moon, and my bruises fit your fingerprints like a glove. I was too young for you then, I'm too young now, and you were too raw and worn and burned beyond recognition, a dragon I was never meant to see. But as your odometer pushed eighty and your fingers pushed through my spine, you said rules didn't apply to you, you were the dark clouds that watched the sun pass, you were what God wished he was. You put the glass in my bones, you know, you are the sand behind my eyes.

You called me a canary and bit curses through my skin until I sang for you in the cold. Sometimes you were iron and steel and crouched over me like a cage, but more often than not you were the reckless boy on the ground with stones in your hands, waiting to knock me out of the sky.

Hate is a strong word, my mother would say, but you were too strong, you were too much. You were the bite of metal on my tongue, the weight of concrete filling my mind. You were the dark eyes through lace curtains, and the taste of regret rising in my lungs, and I swear, sometimes I wake and find you hiding in the back of my eyes. But you broke each rib like a wishbone and left me beneath a street light with blood in my fingernails and cracks in my mind, and you are nothing but red taillights getting smaller in the night, and I don't know what I am anymore. I don't know what to do.