Would You Need Me More If I Needed You Less?

Would You Need Me More If I Needed You Less?

Would you need me more if I needed you less? Would you reach for me more, if my reaching stopped entirely? Would you, if my hand stopped uncurling, and stopped its shaking and made itself into fists around you, fists that can’t be held and forget the warmth of other fingers, crave the feeling of my fingertips on the back of your own hand? Would you pry my scarred fingers apart and force yours between them, filling the spaces, and splitting the spider webs and columns of dust that have attached themselves in the most ornate and gorgeous patterns from underuse?

What would your lips do if my lips stopped diving through the most terrifying emptiness that is the feet or inches or miles between each other just to land upon yours? Would your lips dry and wither and shrink back into your face out of shame and fear and the agony of defeat or would they rise and fill with blood and purpose and red rover red rover send your kisses right over through the wall of my arms crossed in front of my body just to glue themselves to mine once and for all and would you fall asleep with them slightly touching?

If I gave less would you require more? Would you give more to make up for the difference, to fill the air with love instead of sorrow and hope instead of despair? If the words, all the words that I’ve bathed you in since the start of the start stopped falling out of the faucet that I’ve become, would your skin grow cold and miss the sound of the bathtub of your heart filling with them? Would you wash yourself with the soap of someone else’s promises, blowing the bubbles of someone else’s poetry aimlessly around the white walls and sheer fabric of the shower curtain? Would you rush to me and throw towels in the dryer so that after you were done splashing me in the water of all you’ve not said, all the words you’ve swallowed instead of spit, I could dry myself and emerge clean and fresh and reborn? Would you miss the way your hair felt when not wet with the whispers that I never stopped
giving you?

If I took away, piece by piece by piece all that you held dear and replaced it with nothing and the pitter patter of I am sorry typwritering themselves out of my lips and into your ears, would you fall apart? Broken hearts are made of broken pieces, clean breaks so that one day one moment they can be glued back to whole, but what do we do if those broken pieces are broken again and crushed into powder? How then would we rebuild ourselves? Would you stop the shattering when your pieces were still big enough to carry the picture of what the whole used to resemble? What if I stopped asking all the questions and the answers stopped mattering? What if no answer is also an answer and the silence that follows all I wished to know was an answer all this time? What if I fell silent? Would you speak? Would you ask me the questions that kept us afloat? Would you toss them into the stormy sea and let them be the life preservers we wrapped ourselves in? Would you jump in and drown with me?

Would you love me desperately if my love started to fade away? If you woke one morning and you could not see yourself reflected in my eyes how you always had been, if you caught only glances and no longer stares, if you forgot the value of yourself because I could not find the strength and the energy to remind you, would you hold on tighter or would you run away faster? Would you chase me, if I walked away? Would you sprint barefoot over rough streets just to try to grab the fabric of my shirt and pull it backwards time and again and pray with all your prayers each night that maybe tomorrow, I would see. Maybe tomorrow? Would you give up, if I gave up? Would you fight if I threw in the towel? Would you stand and refuse to be the regret that I carried to my grave, when standing meant suffering and suffering meant wishing so badly that you could fall asleep and just maybe not wake up? Would you brace yourself against the wind of my coldness and turn up your collar and shout obscenities into the emptiness?

Would you need me MORE, if I needed you Less? Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Poet. Photographer. Author. Buddhist. Follow him on Instagram here

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