I wake with a start and check on you instinctively; sure enough, you aren’t sleeping.

You’ve ripped open the sutures again and your heart is pumping as strongly as ever, but leaking.

I try to help you, but it’s so hard to sew raw flesh over pixels.

Why bother with foresight if I’m useless?

My mind grasps at the cheapest sense of control, self-blame.

Perhaps there’s some universal pool of allowable joy, just daring me to be happy so it can tear the smile straight off of you.

(It’s only as illogical as any other dogma, really.)

Ignoring voices of exhausted unreason, I try to prescribe the remedies no one wants to endure: time, distance, self-care.

You find something in a bottle instead.

And so we swap insomnia, if not sadness.

—

You’re sitting in a cage again

My god the things we have let our lovers do to us

I keep swearing I won’t repeat this cycle

But if one of us could make it out alive

I hope it’s you