I am a person made of words.
Phrases stitch my limbs together. Stories fill my head like flowers fill a vase. Words are etched into my bones and I fear what secrets my body might betray if I let someone x-ray me, for all the words seem housed there in the marrow.
I am a person made of words and he leaves me empty every time our eyes meet.
Sentiments dry up on my lips and I swallow thorns when I see him. It is a waking nightmare. It feels like the stringy sinews of my muscles being pulled out one by one. The world feels far away and as he speaks, the words evaporate out of my skin and my mouth and my bones and I am left hollow. I sit for weeks wondering who I used to be.
I am a person made of words and he takes them all for himself, like he always has, like he does everything else.
I see him and I try to talk myself off the ledge, hold my breath, don't spin out. But the spinning has begun already and I am too late to stop the catastrophe. What is a bird without wings? The ocean without waves? The sun without heat and light? What am I without the things that piece me together and make me real? Worthless? Alone? Empty? Quiet? Haunted? Whatever it is, it is what I am with him.
I am a person made of words and I have none when he sits down beside me like he's done nothing wrong, like he belongs there, like I belong to him.
The words I prepared for years, for this moment exactly, shrivel up to dust and I have to swallow hard not to choke on what they used to be. Soft civility comes out instead, muted and weak the way everything feels when he comes into a room and takes up all of the space and all of the oxygen and all of the words. He asks questions and in a daze, I answer them gently as I feel my heartbeat slow to a dangerous lull. If he keeps talking, I'll cease to exist. And I die softly, gently, lonely, when he shows me the wedding band on his finger and when his wife walks in and they walk out hand in hand and he leaves me once again.
I am a person made of words and they fail me.
He sucks the life from me, the words from me, the strength from me. He takes everything I have, everything I am, everything I need, and he absorbs it to make himself more. As if he needs more. As if he isn't the center of the gravitational pull of the planet, as if I haven't died a thousand times wondering why he left me alone, as if he doesn't own everything he puts his eyes on. He takes, and takes, and takes and he can have it all because he kills whatever tries to exist beside him. He is the weed choking out the flowers in the garden. He takes all the oxygen and when I look at him, I am at a loss for the words that keep me alive and he does it all with a smile.
I am a person made of words and he is a plagiarizer.
He is a thief and all the words he has from our time together are poison that still runs in my veins, killing me a little at a time. He continues to exist by snuffing me out and he doesn't care that it will take me months to heal from the last five minutes we spent together. He doesn't care that I have spent five years healing from the five months I truly knew him. He doesn't care that my most sincere wish is that I had never met him at all.
