Your smooth words are worn out because you've used it on one too many people, stringing their emotions and feelings on a clothing line, taut and situated.

They are such cliché, been-there-done-that phrases, yet they never fail to enchant me. They are my keepsakes.

The words you speak into the air can make me feel beautiful and wanted and lovely all at once, but only at the spur of the moment.

The spell soon wears out, leaving me with these seething, self-loathing thoughts, a bad aftertaste on the tip of my tongue. You will stop and resume again, weaving webs of compliments and false hopes, catching wandering hearts in your silk. There goes my mine, dropped into a jar of other spare hearts, jingling with change. They are your keepsakes.

I want to catch your words in the palm of my hand, like raindrops during a summer thunderstorm, so I can keep them safe until the sun comes up.

I want something to hold onto when you decide to disperse away from me for good, like the curling of your cigarette smoke, like tiny, intricate crystalline snowflakes melting on my fingertips.

I want to be reminded of the time when you were somebody that I used to love, somebody real and alive with a beating heart and a fluttering pulse. I want to be reminded of the time where you were once mine, (yet, I was never yours) close but inexplicably unreachable. You were somebody who gave me the time of day, someone who made me feel like sunshine and butterfly kisses. I will hold onto these disconnected fragments of time.

They are my keepsakes.