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I hook my teeth on your skin, and you bleed. This is what we have become, a stumbling mess of taking and giving. This tug of war, because neither of us will admit that we— I won’t say it.
You almost broke my nose once and I had to relearn how to keep my hands attached to my body. I want you.
I want. I want, I want, I want. I want to learn how to tear you apart. I want your hands in my hair, tugging. I want to find the places that will ruin you. I want to hear you tell me you hate me, because your fight is for show, love. We can’t help ourselves, those primal instincts to take and take and take. I want to kiss you until there’s red in your mouth, bloodied teeth.
I want you to look at me, your watery brown eyes, those beautiful things, and say, Please.
We made want and love interchangeable, so I can not claim one and not the other. I’m sorry.
☆
When I am near you I don’t know what to do with my hands. If I take them off and hand them to you, will you have them?
I would give you the world if you asked. You don’t know this yet, but one day you will. I hate myself for it, but it is the truth. And it always will be.
You want happiness. I want to keep going. We both can’t have what we want. I don’t blame you. You are a lonely thing, a boy who doesn’t know how to live inside himself. I fear I have done more living as myself then I have for others.
I want to learn how to live for you, I think.
☆
You introduced yourself as Mark, when we first met.
I couldn’t help but want to get closer.
(Now I know. Now I know that maybe I should’ve let you be. I would’ve saved us both.)
☆
They say we are soulmates. You will scoff, defensive, and so will I. They say we are soulmates, and every time, I feel you tense next to me.
Is it so horrible, to put a name on it? To say, here, this is the boy you were made for, so take care of him and keep him close. He is yours.
I am yours, but you will not once let that sentence fall from your mouth, because knowing it is one thing, and admitting it is another.
We were not made for this kind of love.
☆
You are a green-eyed thing, and I want to kiss you for it.
Jealousy is an incurable disease. Jealousy is an incurable disease, so the scowl on your face, the bruising grip on my arm, the firm set of your jaw? You can’t help it, sweetheart.
I dream one day, that I will be able to remind you every day that I will always be yours, at the end of the day.
Dreaming is an act of recklessness, of danger. Especially when it comes to you.
Inside dreams, I hold you in my arms, gentle, loving, like you are meant to be treated. You are a thing made of tenderness, and you should be loved as such. I reach for your teeth and cut myself on them in these dreams, because I am allowed to let you.
This is how we know dreams are meant to only stay dreams.
I can not love you like how you deserve to be loved, when our default is a fault. Outside of a dream, I can not tell you I love you and not expect the blow to land. We snap our mouths and hide behind bitten words, picking and prodding each other apart.
I reach for your teeth, and this time, I pull them out.
☆
You have never learnt how to hurt anyone but yourself in all your years of living.
Before you met me, of course.
I used to like to think I taught you anger. You only affirmed this, when you told me yourself.
When we were younger and I pulled your strings and snapped them, letting go to see what you’d do, you’d have nothing to offer. You blamed yourself for it and kept going.
And then one day, your mouth sets into a firm line, and you finally swing.
I taught you anger, Mark Lee. I taught you anger, and you taught me how to want.
☆
If I could, I would press my hands to the lines of your stomach. I’d hold so gently, love. I want to reach inside and wrap myself around the path that leads to your heart, to build a home in the nest of your ribs.
But I, like all these moments of wanting you, can not.
The way I grasp language and actions and everything humanity uses to communicate, only to throw it at you, until your stomach turns inside out and you run your fingers along your organs, assessing for damage. How, when I reach inside, it’s only because I am trying to tear your heart out at the seams. How I can only seem to make you ache.
☆
I see you looking in the mirror sometimes. How your eyes run over every corner of you, how your fists clench.
At night, when no one else can hear you, least of all the world, you whisper in my ear that you hate what they’ve made of you.
Of course, you do, darling. We all hate ourselves. It’s the way we live in this world.
I hate what they’ve made of us.
(Do you think we would’ve been different in another world? In another life? I would live a thousand lives with you, Mark Lee. I would like to learn you in each one.)
☆
You almost say it once.
You almost say it once, and it’s in the hotel room after a show, and we’re both laid on your bed, pretending that we’re drunk so that we have a reason to explain why our hands are woven together and your head is pillowed on my shoulder.
You almost say it once, and you hate yourself for it.
(A part of me hates you for it too. Leave it unsaid, darling. We both know this isn’t simply wanting.)
You almost say it once and I squeeze my eyes shut. I can only encourage you in my head. Please say it, please say it, ple—
You stop yourself. I can’t blame you for it.
I say that it’s because I keep wanting a part of you that you can’t give me. No, that’s not it. The problem lies in the fact that I want all of you, but who are we if not artists stripped of our own agency?
You don’t have all of yourself for your own, so what can you offer me? It’s alright, love, you don’t have to do anything. No, it’s not there, I don’t mind, it’s all right.
It’s alright. I can go.
☆
(I come back because I can never seem to stay away from you.)
☆
When you’re on your knees in front of me, all I can think is, here. Here he is, the boy I deemed immortal, reminded of who he is and the life he has been living in once again.
You are a god amongst men, but you say that with me, you are reminded that you were human once.
Is to be who we are, then, not human? Do we leave our flaws behind until the hammer is weld into our flesh, until we are carved into perfection?
Made of steel, then. Iron rods are shoved into our skin, and we are told to seem unattainable.
Aren’t we, at the end of the day, only made to be human? And isn’t to force something into something else that it is not the cruelest form of will?
☆
I nick your collarbones with the back of my teeth. I would do anything to put you whole in my mouth, where you would be safe.
You don’t lack, if anything. Your nails scratch the skin of my back, and you claw me until I put myself back together in your arms.
(We hurt ourselves in order to heal. We heal in order to hurt ourselves again.)
☆
Darling, you should do better than love me. I love like a gun.
I am not an honest man. I don’t do anything but hurt, because my mouth is vicious and they urge to crumble you to dust. I am close enough to hurt you, and so I do so.
Pull the trigger. 1, 2,
I hurt because I love. I can not love you without the bullet landing in your heart.
3.
☆
I kiss you with my taped-up nose, and my mouth seeps up the blood between the cracks of your teeth.