Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

God got halfway done making him, said good enough, and shat him out.

But I don’t deserve the same things as him. He’s a simple, pure person, made of cats and cookies and little brick houses full of afternoon sunlight. I’m made of mud and broken things, deep water and suffocation. I pinch my nose and hold it tight shut until the pressure behind my eyes goes away. I need to be swimming right now, free and untouchable, outrunning the dark.

I want to know if being hurt by someone who hates you makes cleaner, sharper wounds than the hideous scars love leaves behind.

Hurt me once, shame on you. Hurt me twice, shame on me. Hurt me a thousand times, I must have done something to deserve this. I was born wrong.

Love has borders, limitations. A million movies and a billion books have charted its course. We chase it because we already know how it makes us feel, and once you’re in love, your only choice is to fall back out of it again.

“Past regrets don’t count as dreams.”

I’m lost, and my heart’s a broken compass that will never get me home.

Our bodies fit together perfectly, every hill and valley contoured to each other like we were one person who got broken in half before we were born.

“I always wished I was a star,” he murmurs into my chest, half asleep. His breathing rises and falls slow against mine and his soft hair tickles my neck. “A ball of fire careening through the void that’s probably dead by the time we see it?” He shakes his head. “No one can reach them; no one can touch them. They’re alone. But they’re not lonely.”

“Maybe that’s it. Everyone else is down here fighting and fucking, all the things we have names for, and we’re just…out there, where it’s quiet and still. And even if we never touched again, we wouldn’t be alone.”

If love can see us now, it must be ashamed that it has nothing to offer. You tore me open and put me back together but you kept something for yourself. You won’t give it back, and now I belong to you.

Someone, somewhere had the power to silence him, to take away his voice and shut the bright summer boy away, alone in the dark.

I’m a pile of broken pieces held together by scars that will never heal. How do I make a life when I’ve never had a chance to know what it means to live?

see the truth in his eyes, pure and absolute. He would never pity me. He fucking worships me. And I believe he would kill for me, if I wanted him to. He’d probably cry his eyes out and spend the rest of his life beating himself up about it, but it’s the thought that counts.

Sometimes, when you open the door of a cage after so many years, the wild thing inside is more afraid to be free than it was to be caged. All I can do is sit next to the door and wait.

He’s all the things that drive me crazy and all the things that lead me home.

And sometimes we say I love you, and sometimes we say I hate you, and sometimes we just exist together without a name, two stars in the universe, and it doesn’t matter because they’re all different names for the same thing, something that will never belong to anyone but us.