Do you have monsters too?

 He's got a tenderness that I have craved and never been able to find.

There's something so incredibly gentle about the way he moves and speaks and something in me is drawn to it like a magnet.

There is a darkness in the back of his eyes, something brooding and alive that I recognize.  It's the kind of darkness that I've seen every time I look into the mirror.

It's a familiar kind of sickness that makes me want to reach out and touch him just to make sure he's real.

I wonder if a hand on his arm will pull him back down to earth the way it does me.  He seems to float above his body the way I do.  How does he come back into his skin, I wonder, how does he come back, and can he show me?

I'm not certain, but I think he might be fragile like me, stuck together with sheer willpower and an exhaustion that clings to his bones.

I don't know how to ask. 

I don't know how to ask if he has monsters haunting the quiet spaces in his mind like I do, but I think he does.  I don't think I need to ask.  I think I can see them.

Only people who have monsters in their heads can see them in other people and I don't think we are so different at all.

Do you have monsters in you too?

Does the skin you've been given feel like an ill-fitting disguise?

Does your soul feel the need to escape at all?

I can't ask him.  I can't ask anyone.  They're the kind of questions you swallow even though they feel like razor blades.

Does the darkness swallow you up sometimes?

Do you ever feel like you're disappearing?

Do you feel like you're floating away?

No, I can't ask.  But looking at him is achingly familiar.  It's like looking at a funhouse mirror.  Everything is the same and yet also somehow distant and distorted.

I think if we found our way together it would either heal us or destroy us once and for all.  Maybe that's enough of a reason to walk away.

But I don't want to.  I want to find the path that we could walk together.  I want to find a way to show him that I think we might have matching scars.  I want him to see me and to know that I can see him too.