The first time I told him,
If you can’t
love yourself,
you’ll never
love me,
he laughed,
said, That’s not true.
Said it was because of me
that he didn’t hate the world.
Then he grabbed my wrist
and on it he wrote:
love.
A few weeks later,
another bad night
filled with tears
and heart-wrenching words.
I told him,
If you can’t
love yourself
you can’t love me.
He said,
That’s a lie.
I was the reason
he kept moving forward.
Then, he grabbed my wrist
and wrote
love.
A few months later
I’d had enough.
He refused to be helped;
he cried himself to sleep.
He kept telling me
I was the only thing he loved.
So I told him
because you can’t love yourself,
I can’t love you.
He grabbed my wrist
as I tried to walk away
and slid a bracelet on.
The braided tread
hung tightly
on a twisted medal
that read:
love.
A few hours later,
his bathroom walls were
smeared with blood;
crimson
lines
ran across the
white tile,
the bathtub’s water
dyed red,
and from his wrists
something I could not call
love
flowed.