Your Downfall

A mess of emotion eats at my empty stomach making it ache deeper, to my core. Desire fills my chest and the act of breathing becomes laborious in the tightened pathways. A need so guttural screams to be released making my teeth grind together in anguish. This uncertainty of your feelings for me is going to destroy me from the inside out. I devour every memory of us in a frenzied attempt to see through you. To dissect your motives and read your signs. The need is an instinctive primal one that consumes me most hours of the day. Sleep hardly offers a solace. Your smile fills my dreams and the places where your figurative fingers met my dreaming skin sting as I wake. Confusion is hardly capable of describing how I feel. I weigh the rewards and consequences of perusing this tugging in my gut with eager fervor. I'd like to tell myself it's your name that this insatiable yearning stems from but I am doubtful. Tracing my steps backward farther and farther into the blackness of the past, I stumble across too many resemblances of these gut wrenching feelings. You are not the problem. It is I. My desire for requited affection grows daily, fed by the hopeless romantic living deep in my soul. The desire for love is accompanied by the strangest want of tragedy though and this makes my hair stand on end with curiosity. All imagined scenarios come with a tragic, painful twist. Without which, they become unsatisfying. The things I write, the stories I create, the desires in my heart have become polluted with a dark taste for pain. It is unsettling to realize this. Maybe I'm drawn to you because of all the red flags and not in spite of them. Maybe triumph over the battles is less of a victory and more of an attempt to placate myself by playing with fire. It is for this reason I hold you at arms length. Close enough to feel the fire under your skin but far enough so as to not be blinded by my want. Protection for you and myself is more important than my desire to dance amid the flames. And the desire for dancing in flames terrifies me. I am not the girl I used to be. I am darned and jaded and changed. I seek out tragedy and find beauty in it where it used to only show me pain. After everything you've been through, I don't want to drag you down too. No matter how much I ache for your touch. Or crave your breath on my skin. Or need to hear your laughing voice. I will not be your downfall. I refuse to be the anchor that drags you to the rocky bottom. If I must sink, I will untangle myself from you first. I will not be your downfall.