When Empty People Try To Love

My hands are scarred from holding thorns of my past close to my chest; these thorns guard what’s left inside, the tiny glimmer of light and life that I selfishly keep to myself because this is the only thing that makes me human.

They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, but mine are not. They’re shuttered from the inside and fenced with wires of lies so thick that you’d feel the pinpricks of deceit if you look close enough.

A serpentine tongue is coiled underneath my smiling lips; it can whisper the most beautiful words to the ear but can also twist itself around the neck of anyone who comes near.

My body is a patchwork, stitched together with the parts of the people I have given myself to in the past, the sutures crisscrossed on my skin from the parts where I have been touched so carelessly, like a Frankenstein doll in strings.

And my mind? Let’s not even go there.

So this mess of a person is what’s tangled with you now in between this pleasure-stained sheets, scarred limbs and shuttered eyes and saccharine, serpentine tongue keeping you company as you lay in silence, your body inviting but your heart missing.

We are the products of explosives that detonated in opposite ends of the world, but somehow our remnants found their way to each other, like long lost pieces floating in the air and we suddenly collided and we both just knew then that we’re children of wars, the kind of battles fought within the walls of our hearts.

They always say misery loves company, but they rarely say anything about emptiness. This shit doesn’t just love company — it preys on it. If you’re empty, you’re always on the prowl to find someone that can fill that black hole, but more often than not, you just end up sucking people into your abyss and dragging them down with you in your own quicksand. But you can’t do that if the company you find is just as empty as you are, if not more.

You either end up eating each other alive, empty feeding on empty like cannibals, or you just click, simple and easy.

Looking at you now with your eyes fixed on the ceiling, unblinking, I see a mirror image of myself — empty, damaged, broken, filled with and experienced way too much shit to even put into words. I don’t know the wars you have fought in your lifetime that made the light inside you go out, and I don’t even want to ask, because I’m afraid of opening my own Pandora’s Box as well, but lying down here beside you in the dead of the night with our scars and wounds exposed, I have to say that emptiness never felt so good.

With the sound of bombs still ringing in our ears and our dreams still drenched in blood, it might seem impossible for us to find a home in each other. We are too protective of the ruins in our hearts, because that’s all we have left. But, my love, it is also from these ruins that a new city may rise, a place that we can build together and call our own — a sanctuary that will eclipse all the havens we have found in the past.

But, who will surrender first in this game of hearts? Who has built stronger walls?

I have learned that you cannot hurt emptiness. It’s like slicing through air. But you can make it feel, you can fill it. Emptiness won’t be able to understand at first, but if you try harder, it will begin to feel something. And it starts from there.

With this black hole inside me, I actually don’t understand what I’m feeling right now as I lay here beside you. I don’t see a future yet, but I’m in a state of contentment at present. Wounded as I am, still, you embrace me, and you seem to see stars on my body instead of scars. You don’t care, even as I leave a trail of blood on your sheets, even if I trespass your walls.

Let’s fill each other’s emptiness for tonight and for many nights hereafter. It starts from here, at this moment. Time is what we need; people like us will only be revealed through time. Only then can we understand if love, or something like it, can exist, even in the midst of emptiness.

And who knows, maybe this could even lead to something beautiful in the end.