I.

every night the mixed-colored lesion living on my lower back you gave me for my 20th birthday dwells so softly and harshly on my weakening corpse as it speaks to the rest of its kind. it reminds us that i was once lively and strong and couldn’t tell the difference between being in love and being besotted with because i am what comes from love. its yellow hues remind me of when you and i would pick daises in the small field behind your grandmother’s lake house in northern new hampshire. we were sixteen then and that was the first time mentioning you thought you might be in love. i was too dense to realize you were not in love with me but merely infatuated with the idea that you finally found an outlet for every plight and predicament of yours. you found someone who was so foolishlyhelplesslycluesslydumbstruck with every inch of your f***ing self and had been dimwitted enough to let you paint them with the colors of a beaten sky that shown only on nights i could sneak away from your smothering clutch. only the crimson of my hair and the red of my wrists would grow to be far more vibrant than the other colors on that battered canvas. you strung blinding yellow daisies from the field behind your grandmother’s house in my hair and told me everything would be okay. we will be okay. that was the first time you ever told me a prodigious lie and gave me a ring as if to make up for it.

II.

i have another ring from you now. it’s different from the one first offered to me in our field of daises that still smell so strongly of the night we first met. we were four and my mother came with me to your house to introduce ourselves to the new neighbors. the pungent odor of smoke lurked in your doorstep and you looked frightened. your mother came out in a bathrobe and pajamas, lit cigarette in hand. she sent the two of us to play while the adults talked as she looked down on you with contempt. i understand why you treat me this way. she gave you a hard push as you quite literally tumbled out on the porch and that is when i learned your eyes speak just as loudly as your mouth but not quite so as your fists. now you look sly and reek of whiskey too. sometimes a breeze would come by and sweep the scent of flowers over the alcohol. that is what you still smell like.

III.

the ring you gave me back when my morality was still intact is still small, purple, sinless, artless, and full of false hope. it brought a smile to my face so bright that made the daises look dull. it made the striking colors you would come to leave imprinted on every inch of my flesh appear faded. each falsity i held close at sixteen juxtaposes the new ring around my neck. the ones you give me now are dark brown and blue with hints of a lovely, gruesome shade of yellow holding a little bit of purple in there too. it makes me think of the smaller ring from our field of daises because of the lavender, although that is the one i wear around the pointer finger on my left hand, and this one dawns on my neck but will fade away before the next one comes. they come each time i contradict or yell at you. each and every time you give me another i can feel a final breath escaping my sorrow-soaked lips as i beg you to let me hold on for just one more second. yet you said i love you so this must be alright.

IV.

your hands keep etching works of art into skin making my back tell a story no book would ever dare speak. my voice used to be so loud and powerful it made the daises sway alongside the wind but you taught me to fear the confidence i once held. scrawny, scathing fingers carving pictures of your abject emotions into the depths of every vein; trenchant enough to make knives feel dull, leaving a blood-soaked daisy on my back as you kiss the blood away and continue burying craven sentiments so far deep into my bloodstream they pour back out every time i try scratching them away from my wrists each night. you told me the bruises would go away with a bottle of rum and one last f*** because that’s what people in love do, muttering this through more cuts being made from your spindly fingers as you pin me down one last time with more bruises coming from your fists, all screaming poisonous i love you’s and bidding their last goodbyes. you taught me what love really feels like as i  drift a   w      a          y from myself and further into your taut, tender grasp, setting a final ring onto my blackened neck and i am able to learn what the bright white daisies look like in somewhere that must be heaven.