One

This is how it starts. This is how it always starts. One, you were not just a person or a feeling, it was like you were an entire home within yourself. A home with an attic that carried echoes of 9-1-1 calls and a basement filled with leftover party decorations that still haven’t been taken down in over a year. Your “forever” is the one helium balloon still stuck to the rafters, hanging on for an ending that was inevitable to begin with. The helium leaks out at the same rate that I am able to forget about you, and that goddamn balloon is still full.

This will always be how it starts. You will look at me and I will melt into a f*****g puddle of nothing and you will look at the mess you created and give yourself a pat on the f*****g back and you will imagine drowning me in a bathtub at the same exact time that I am imagining drowning myself in a bathtub. I will look at you, and I will suddenly know everything, I will know you and I will know myself and I will know that this will fall apart.

One, you do not deserve me. One, I just want you to know this.

Every time I walk in your front door, I can smell the burning fabric, and it isn’t that I think this is what home should smell like, it’s just that you mask it so well with sea foam candles and so much f*****g bleach. 

It’s like I could spend the rest of my life in the closest thing a home will ever come to being a prison, or I could risk losing the most comfortingly beautiful pain I’ve ever known, One, and everyone in the whole goddamn world knows I’m picking you. 

For as long as I can remember, I have been holding your heart in my left hand, because god knows I’m saving my dominant hand for something important. For as long as I can remember, you have been holding me captive inside your skeleton, letting me free twice a week to tell me I’m pretty.

I want to tell you all about my heart, One. I want to tell you what it thinks about and how much it would love to know you and how often it pretends to know you and how often it breaks because of you and I want to tell you about my heart, One, because maybe then you will remember it’s there.

“We all know what salt water tastes like whether we have breathed it in or not, but not everyone knows that a bucket of ice cold water has a smell.” I want to tell you.

“You’re so f*****g special, Two,” I want you to say.

One, you will always be wrong as long as there is a knife in your hand. Even if I am nodding. 

One, you were the kind of home with secrets. You were a home with lovely wallpapered walls, flowers and sailboats and paisley print, put up in every room in order to make the house more flammable. I would sit in the wallpapered kitchen and drink a glass of lighter fluid and then swallow a lighter except it never got to that because being around you had the same effect on my body. 

One, I know I am not supposed to say this to you. One, I need you.

I should f*****g know by now that this is how it starts. I should know by now to listen to my body telling me that we don’t need you, I don’t f*****g need you, you are not home. I should know by now that loving someone and needing someone live such separate lives from one another, and I love you with all of my heart, One, but I would be kidding myself and everyone I know if I said I needed you.

Here’s the thing, though, One, I need you.

Sometimes I look at you, One, and I see how you are full to the brim with tears and most of them are mine. Sometimes I look at you, One, and I wonder how you never overflow.

This will always be how it starts. You will turn to face me and suddenly everything in the world will turn cold. You will turn to face me and I will start to become you and I wonder if this is how you keep me around. What even is keeping me around. 

I will sleep in the basement you built for me and I will listen to you upstairs and I will think I hear someone who isn’t you but there are too many escape plans running through my head to keep listening. 

One, I am going to get away from you. One, I could never leave you.

The only way to escape your wrath, One, is for you to find a new Two. But One, I need to be the only Two, for this all to have been for something. If I am your forever, maybe I will learn that when I walk on eggshells in just the right pattern, it looks like dancing. Maybe I will learn that turning to stone sometimes looks just like a statue in an art museum. If I am your forever, One, maybe I can learn to be enough for you and I will finally be worth something. 

This is how it ends, One. I know now that I need to say to you the opposite of what I would have said when it started. Don’t come back to me, One. Don’t ever come back to me.

Author's Note

This is very experimental for me; my first time posting on here. I am by all means an amateur writer and know this piece is not advanced.
I would love some advice on the opening sentences (feels too literal for me) and transitions between ideas.
Does the representation of abuse come through?