Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

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

The arm that’s not over his eyes lies open on his lap, the vulnerable inside of his wrist exposed where it flows into his wide palm. I can imagine the soft, sensitive skin if I put my fingers there, the relentless pulse of someone whose body keeps fighting even when he doesn’t want to live.

For someone who wants to die, I’m awfully afraid of being dead.

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.

Hate is intimate, endless, obsessive. Addictively co-dependent. You can’t disappoint someone who believes in the worst possible version of you. You can only memorize them, every hope to break, every vulnerability to tear open, until they’re your everything and you’re their shield against the nightmares that you made for them.

“It hurts too much,” he whispers. “I need to quit you slow, or it’s going to kill me.”

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.

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.