I Wove my hands into a basket, and gave him all I could carry, but he only saw how tiny my hands were

So I gave him my arms, and I tried to hold him between them, but my hands never met on the other side
They always fell too short to his expectations
There was always so much of him and too little of me

So I stretched like a trampoline, tried to make my skin a canvas he can paint his sorrows on









But the bristles of his paintbrush were too harsh and his words hurt much the same

They stung like the droppings of his cigarette; careless and unapologetic, leaving trails everywhere he went
Some on the carpets, some on the seats
and some in me
It was his addiction, but he
was mine

I called it patience
I called it endearment
I called it painful
But I called it love

And continued to make room for the shattered pieces of him
Room in my throat, in my hands and inbetween my eyelids and although I could no longer breath
Could no longer close my hands in fists
And could no longer bat my eyelashes at the sight of him

I called it love

And I am young, and I might be clueless but this was not hard to read
This was no enigma code
What I felt was no jigsaw puzzle
There are no other rearrangements for the word love but there are synonyms

Infatuation
He was infatuated by the way I made him feel,
He was infatuated at my ability to make him feeling anything at all

He had long since forgotten how it felt to be loved, and I reminded him,
But in my own forgetfulness, I forgot to remind him how to love