lack

people talk about love as if it can save you. as if it can float you away to a semblance of fantasy. as if it can pull you from the abyss and draw light in you. but let me say, love doesn’t save anyone. love instead pushes you off your high regard and lets you fall, becoming hercules thrown off olympus. how is that the touch of a savior? you always told me i was your savior, but i couldn’t saved you. how did you expect me to? i still haven’t saved myself. people think love is presence, but let me tell you, for me, it was always absence. i mark my days by how long it has been since i’ve seen you last. distance has spread us so thin that black tallies line my skin, tattooing themselves into my bones. people talk about love as if they have felt it. but i look at you, and i know that no one has felt anything like this, that no else has ever been in love. maybe angels need to be pulled down from the skies, maybe the only way to reach salvation is to break open the heavens. life’s sandpaper arms roughen my soul, and i do my best to imagine that i am good enough, but my imagination isn’t good enough, and i know my teeth hide a silver tongue, but my mouth is a jailer, and my jaws have never moved in the right direction, and my lips have never touched yours, and they have never said the words. people talk about love as if it is the best thing in the world, but i know that the universe is the best thing in the world. it is just that you are the lighthouse of my universe, when you’re not there, everything is just a little bit darker. people talk about love, but i talk about being in love, and i guess i just want you to know that i am in love with myself. the ocean was never a place i liked to visit, but i have fallen off my high regard, and water always played the line between savior and destroyer. you have always been the whirlpool, destroying everything that circles and circles and circles. we circle. i have always been the black hole, pulling lighthouses into my grasp only to destroy their identities. maybe we are distant for a reason. i am scared to grow sandpaper arms, my legs don’t have the strength to climb olympus, and there are no more wings since the angels became the demons, but i just wanted to let you know, i have learned to swim; i would rather drown than collapse in the whirlpool of you, and i don’t need your lighthouse anymore to make my way to the shore.