I don’t believe I fully know you. Those hands that had once decorated me pink with daisy fantasies could not be the ones that plant themselves so firmly in the arms of solitude. Those hands which are designed to aimlessly pick apart petals before ladybugs can creep upon him and pain him with the plague of fragility. You couldn’t preserve that twisted coldness if you  allowed yourself to bleed on soft skin, the fatal birthmark of your starved artistry. It’s a brilliant performance you give really. I mean, that’s why you do it, right? You paint yourself in scathing scars, waiting eagerly for your standing ovation as the martyr of literary talents, as if this genius can only hemorrhage from the cuts of critique, that these bloodied lenses give you access to colors unseen, colors above the blue.  And don’t you love this little world you've made with the damaged man and his mighty pen. You’ll gladly climb within these scars, infatuated with how inhabiting its gory interior will perfect your skin.  But I know it’s because somehow you found a way to blur this cynicism  into romance.  Some days I question whether you even truly like the pen, or are just enamored with the picture-esque quality of holding it in your hand. 

Maybe it's not the grip, but rather compelling the ink to claim  territory that hypnotizes you so.  For the page can be nothing but you. It can only be the fabricated mirror of your ingenue complexion and the supposed merit that has swelled beneath this Earth unawakened. It’s your own lonesome journey from which you can return home bruised and proud. 

 Surely those hands could not have been of your body. Though I’ve felt them, they must be of a different shade, of a different time when pink was a new tint to your collection, one that could color a fresh kiss into your scenes. But perhaps that has dried up by now. You’re too comfortable with pink, too safe. You’re searching for some unknown, repulsive hue, one that’s been imbued with pretentious apathy. Yet, I wish your hand would crave me and accept me. It’s an intoxicatingly alluring wound we’ve made, and if I could drive that knife ever forward, I could nest myself within, outstretching my arms and legs in solace. I turn to your clenched fist laying in the seat next to me, praying that maybe you’ll let my fingertips waltz in your direction and intertwine with your own. But I knew that in this contaminated air of the taxi cab, such vision was merely an illusion. 

How badly did I want to understand it. I truly wanted its contents to at once uncoil me down to bone and whisper to me how underneath this inebriated, aged breath, daisies could still grow. I wanted its words to remove you of your flesh to where veins would burst, and I could taste to see what sweetness still resides within it.  Maybe I wanted to understand that there was still some piece of you worth loving.  But this heart simply was not real. Or rather, this citadel  your acumen had apparently blessed you with rotted more into prosy than prose. 

“It’s good,” I lied. But it’s an idle game. The man who wears the mask is always the first to unmask another. It can no longer be a celebratory night out for us. 

“I think we should go,” you sighed, frustrated that the gates of prodigal wit were too high for me to scale. Maybe that’s why you can’t acknowledge my hand. These were no longer the palms of a creature that could be touched, but ones dirtied with the poison of my vicious tongue. I weep for that lone hand of yours. I really do. It doesn’t deserve to be pricked by such incompetent thorns. Although, I know these bruises are purely cosmetic. Yet at the same time, it makes me lurch for the hand more.  Maybe if you’d let me re-enter those pages, I’d awake again differently and be invited into your eyes, understanding the beauty of the tapestry you pride yourself on weaving.  Then I could properly crown you. Then you could hold my hand. 

As we reach the apartment complex, you stride  in front of me, not even turning my way to meet my gaze. So I must follow. You want me to.  So maybe that’s the heart of you. I must admit, I do want you to own me, even in this distorted sense. For I am moved by the hands that consistently un-piece me. It’s a thrilling ride at which I’ll throw myself into your embrace just to be decomposed by your familiar fingers, time after time. 

I head into the bedroom alone, with you straying from my field of view. Yet, peering out behind the door, I see you at the balcony, invading the peaceful, blue horizons with a drag of your cigarette. It’s a nauseating scene, and yet I still find myself longing to be embedded in this smoke just to feel you.  I suppose these cigarettes are the only ways in which your visions can be felt in the lesions of reality. And it’s with that very trait where our fingers interlace, as this same solemn  night sky is the only place You can exist for me. You who are not fearful over pinks and ladybugs.  I must have figured out how this warped heart beats then, that we can only hold each other in our isolated parts. 

When I was in elementary school, there’d always be a group of boys who’d break bugs in the recess yard. They’d smash these complex creatures through infantile hands, not even trying to understand its delicate breath. If it could fit in the size of their hand, it was meant to be dominated by the fists of their primal desires. They’d crush its body with a hasty foot to see what disturbingly fascinating shape it may take.  They’d rip off wings to see if it could still fly. They'd parade their nightmarish creations across the field, or sometimes threaten to tangle it in some girl's golden locks. Either way, they’d be held as the painters of the yard, whose reckless brushstrokes were so enwrapped in the male genealogy to the point where any attempts to nurture through mannered arms were simply abandoned. Their curiosity was watered with  tainted cradles that applauded these disfigurements as a masculine art form, as if these hands that dared to reorchestrate the score of nature were too inspired to be entwined with the word “no.”  No girl wanted to play with the boys that broke bugs. And yet I love it all the same. 

You at last creep into the bedroom, joining me in the quietness of the mattress. What a wasteful night this all was. 

“You know I love you, right?” you whisper to me, with wings still crushed in your fists.

“Mhm,”

“Good,” you say. 

Perhaps boys were built to break bugs.