You Are Nothing

By

Boys are fragile. And you aren’t any different. You are defined by threads of illusion and doused in ego and fast and temporary words that lose meaning the moment they leave your tongue. I’m growing up with every step I take outside of my norm, diving deep into my depth, without a life raft; no plan B.  I’m learning what it is to experience things beyond the smoke and that ‘cool’ is just a label people love to use to mask how lonely and out of place they truly feel.

People are like are glass, breakable and not even a little bit sustainable in this cold world that’s built to crush the weak and too tall. I always thought I was so insecure and my fears acted like larger than life shadows, dancing in the night, snatching my sleep and self worth. I use to get anxiety the times we met and I used to obsess about the times you told me I was never enough and that I needed to do A, B and C to be something you could even entertain. So I played that game, taking my insides for granted, breaking myself in agony, trying to be who I wanted you to see me as.

You blamed me for being something you could never love, said you had an endless list of things I was not and you didn’t have to say any of it because I could hear it in the tone of your voice, the way you looked at me, as if I was a kind of magic but something too away from everything you were taught to want. And you want, you need, you crave and maybe even love, but how can you love something when self love is so far behind you? Can you even see your own reflection or is it just something you count on other people to tell you about? What are you? A collection of stories, hearsay pieces of words strung together in favorable tones and moods to pass off as real? You told me I was too there for you, as if me making time for you and somehow balancing the rest of my life was so foreign, impossible even. That loving you, appreciating your presence and wanting to hear about your life was somehow a sin? These are easy crosses to burn me with because you could never dream of doing it yourself, so you chose to hate the things in me that you so clearly lacked. If you could somehow get away from crucifying me for being brave enough to love you and walk around with the heavy armour of fear and cowardice and pass it off as strength, casualties like my heart and the billion and one possibilities were irrelevant.

Throughout my life, I thought it was a curse to want to destroy myself every day and create a another self, but it is a gift because in destruction comes re-birth; in ruin, empires are built and in love, I am the strongest. Do you know what it’s like to feel the wrath of rejection and unrequited love or grief and loss but still hear your heart beat again the next day? Do you know what it feels like to live with guilt and regret and be burning in circle of hell so painful still have the faith to look up anyway? No, you don’t. Because you simply don’t have the heart or the strength. Because living isn’t a bed of roses, it’s thorny and bloody and painful, marred with heartache and regret. Making love isn’t always about sex and love isn’t easy or effortless. Opening up to someone isn’t a transaction but an act of love and fear, vulnerability and the crumbling of walls to expose things we didn’t know were possible. The pursuit of happiness is not a race to some finish line, it is in every connection, word and the courageous steps you take every single minute of your life.

So you are nothing to me. You are pieces of a cup, sipped by many, savored by none. You never knew what love was but you knew lust like it was something you were born out of. You don’t know soulmates, champions, you are simply a man, a boyfriend to a girlfriend and nothing more. 

You are nothing.

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