When it comes to you and these increasingly frequent rainy evenings, I keep finding myself in one of these frustratingly human patterns one can't help but get trapped in.
I find myself pulled into the spiderweb allure of these dead-ending cycles of pictures gone bad and the words that are the ragged bits and pieces left by the versions of us we've replaced, times over. I seem to have found some sort of comfort in rounding these black bends that take me nowhere: I am being swallowed by the addiction of clinging tight at the juncture of letting go.

Maybe I just miss a sort of you;
The who you are that too exists as a point within the terminating line of you in this life that shared a presence at the intersection with my own limited arc.
Maybe I'm hung up on a burnt-out, blunt-edged piece of undefined hope -the kind without a general direction- that is the brusque but polite Facebook error message that says it can't load your timeline, because it's a whisper in my ear and a slide down, nice and easy, that you still care enough to leave my name in the code of your block list (even though these days, you're more and more alone).
Maybe my hands still manage to dredge up some smoke-scented debris of your ashy wreck in those old accounts you abandoned; some cross-section of your having been there in the worn and tattered pages of Google search results that managed to pin you down.
I delude myself, in these precious moments, that the handwritten sarcasm at the margins of your psych evaluations and licensed diagnoses (hoisted like flags on Reddit, and unscrupulous image-hosting sites) are once again words I have your permission to read.
Even now I still feel the churning in my stomach and hear the hollow ring in my chest at the stark snapshots of your unhelpful medicine bottles, the traces of your uncertain dosages, the stark white walls that were supposed to lay bare the monsters dancing in your head;
The wires that hooked you up to a machine that was supposed to take you somewhere, elsewhere, anywhere,

But never did.

I close my eyes and fail to sympathize; raw and bleeding, a painful kind of white, in the walls, your sheets, the paper in the questionnaires and notebooks that materialize at every other waking hour; bespectacled, inscrutable, invading strangers that come at you with clicking pens and measuring devices.
They look down at you with their practiced expressions and believe in your practiced speech of needing to be inside that box and written inside those lines: in other words, not loose and ethereal with a sun and other stars and a sky overhead and some sand or green grass or running water at your feet,
And someone who doesn't flinch at the taste of blood on your teeth and isn't afraid to accidentally brush against your scars.

I never pretended you were normal and youthful and new;
I never hastened to cover up the scratch marks at your headboard, to bleach away the ink stains, to mint away the lingering medicinal taste at your lips and your skin. I never ignored your tears or blanked out your words or threw away your lines. I never avoided your gaze-

Where you wanted blindness

Deafness, opacity, ignorance and virginity of your ennui.
I was the only one who would look at you, and you found that you hated your reflection.

I understood you to be human. I understood the need for touch. I watched your eyes close and your breath hitch and your cold fingers afraid to do more than skim my skin,
Moving like waves over the bumps and the raised skin and the unhealed hatching, I didn't mean to burn my way through. How we were we to know that with a pass of my palm I sliced open the memory; that under your eyelids you relieved the day you held the blade and pushed; that with my mouth you tasted pain in my absolution, and you wouldn't bear being forgiven.
You had days of crawling out of your stale sheets and musty caves to look for clean and pure to mar.
There are days you sit and lie among your fellow marked expired,
And you smile at the image of yourself a corrupting monster, and feel at home at the thought of yourself as a stain.

I tore into you as alcohol sears at a flesh wound.
It must have crossed into physical pain when you tried to lose yourself in me, you fool, me foolish, trying to breathe in the ambrosia of flirting with the edge and inhaling the poison of seeing how far you could fall. I pulled at your clothes and your facade hit the floor.
I must have stung you: little kisses of concentrated acid dripping boiling drops at your exposed skin.