Where am I now? I fear I’ll never know. This body is mine yet it belongs to someone else; I am not in the skin, the spider web of blood filled veins beneath it. Nor is my rhythm in my heartbeat that always seems to be steadier than my hands, these hands that write words I can’t seem to bring meaning to though there are choking, strangling feelings behind them. I am not the lungs that take in every breath and release it like clockwork, nor the voice that speaks and sings. She is lovely, enchanting, and smiles like a dream; but it’s only skin deep.

I know I am alive because I can feel a pulse, not because I can see a blurry world in front of me, days passing like sand washing away on the shore of a beach with every crashing wave, carried away to never be seen again, like every second that I waste waiting for a reason to get up when the sun has risen and the night has gone.

Once upon a time I believed in the words ‘I love you’, and I thought that they carried meaning. They were like the first blossom of spring unfurling it’s petals inside of my willing heart, the roots twining around its surface like a comfortable, gentle embrace and feeding me sustenance and warmth as if I were love’s most cherished child. I thought there was such a thing as happily ever after.

He was a thrilling, dangerous toxin that filled me with deadly exhilaration and an overzealous desire for what I could never have; his heart. He was a fortress; impenetrable stone that I could only pound desperately at and scream and pray for the gates to open and let me in to that beautiful, complex mind where I thought I might find some semblance of happiness. He called himself the forbidden fruit; and I ate my fill.

Then there was the cottage in the center of a sunny meadow filled with all of the promise of a fairytale; without a cloud in the expansive sky which held at least a thousand stars to wish on each night while the fireflies brushed kisses on me and said I’d never be forgotten and alone again.

This cottage wasn’t a dwelling at all; but the arms of one I loved and who loved me, selflessly, unconditionally. He was the only home I needed, the only one. There was no more pain anymore, no more sting of poison or doubt at the back of my mind. Yet, despite it all… I was hungry for something that he could not give me.

I needed my poison, and he was there waiting for me, under the cloak of darkness beside the old willow tree, because he knew that eventually I would come crawling back like a blind animal seeking the sunlight from within its den, clawing at the surface with yellowed teeth and only swallowing dirt and lies.

I drank my poison, I indulged in my forbidden fruit, left behind a love that was true for the volatile, thrilling life that wasn’t a life at all but a faster path to decay.

I drank my poison, and he killed me.