I ask when you think we’re going to fix this, swaddling the crescent color of your eyes like something I didn’t remember, to peel and unstick and press against my ribcage. You just smile. You used to only ever use the word cool to describe me, and complicated, sometimes my eyeliner would dull and crinkle against the side of your face and you would frown and press it away, ash on your hands and stains under your nails and you’d say see, see, this is what I mean, like that would mean anything at all. I am a bundle of wrong mixed with blood and red wine and carbon, a concoction to bake into the cracked skin of my shoulder, dried earth you’ve watered between your hands. You tell me that I’m obsessed with myself and maybe I am but I swear that just comes from a place of hate. We watched A Streetcar Named Desire together. My hands shook against my knees in the theater. I felt your shoulder against mine like some sort of detonation and I couldn’t breathe until I heard you breathe, a symphony of hate and curdling, softness in holding hands. Every other time I tell you something you think I’m lying and I can’t really blame you for that. I treat mistruth as my scene partner, clinging like a taste on my tongue. The colors of the stage opened like a lipsticked mouth and the rest of everything was dark, your face was dark, sometimes when you’re quiet or cold I hate you for it and I’m sorry. Once I read a line from 4.48 Psychosis to you and you said stop stop stop. “I dreamt I went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.” Once I let you read something I pulled up with a rope through my throat, and then afterwards I felt it inside my stomach for hours, turning over and burning and burning. Everytime that I dream that I tell you that I love you I wake up crying. Once I dreamed that you reached for my hand in that theater. You’re always wearing that same green shirt. All I did was touch your wrist. I just felt for the cotton and the threading. I told you that I liked it. You told me that I’ve said that before.