When You Told Me You Loved Me

“I truly loved you,” you said

Amidst the floating ash and glowing embers of the fallout

The bare terrain I had finally mustered the strength to return to

To sift through the debris for missing pieces.

When you spoke, I knew I could smite you down

For daring to address me, for desecrating holy ground with even more black soot

But I didn’t.

I believed you—rather, I believed you believed yourself;

Like a man weathered by sands of the desert knows the immensity of the ocean,

Like a child grown within a vast and endless plain knows the enormity of the mountains,

Like a newborn babe knows the infinity of the world,

You knew true love.

Had you known love, you would have known better

Than to guilt me for spending time as I chose

Guilt me until my friends began to wonder what they’d done to disgust me,

Until my mother stood by the damp windowsill mourning the loss of a daughter to apathy,

Until I wore my relationship status on my sleeve to ward off the eyes of other boys—

It wasn’t their gaze I feared, but yours—

Even time to sleep was not holy to you,

So you made me your Pavlovian Dog

That stood stock-straight and gushed cheer and sunshine at the ding of my cellphone

Into the waning hours of the night.

Until you commented on the bags under my eyes in the morning.

Had you known love, you would have loved what you were given

Not slowly swap my flip flops for thigh-high socks

With the sharp edge of your crooning tongue,

A tongue I dangled off the cusp of

With every kiss and honey-dipped taste of affection,

A pointed tongue that slowly burrowed into the pale flesh of my ear

So slowly I grew accustomed to the pain and claimed it as my own

And remade my wardrobe at what I thought was my own volition.

The new voice inside my head had slithered in unbeknownst,

The unannounced puppet-master who strung me years ago

Strings I never could manage to completely sever

Strings I have still found guiding me even now.

Had you known love, you would never have lost me—

Not to say that all failed love is poison,

But poison caused our love to fail.

I never found a balm: I created one

A slowly built immunity to the toxins you were slipping into every kiss and touch

Until I saw my own sickness.

And then I finally fled, not right away to light but into deeper darkness

To heal my wounds in the peace of a cave

Where I could steadily retrieve my lost health and heart on my own terms.

And when I finally mustered the strength to return

To the barren terrain to sift through the debris for missing pieces,

You told me you had loved me.

I said nothing to you,

Because words are hollow without the scope,

Because what could be gained from telling you

That it’d taken years to reverse the effects of your “love”,

That I’d grown so used to your manipulation I’d forgotten who I’d been before,

That just because I’d grown used to it all didn’t mean it was okay,

That at long last I’d finally learned that I deserved better—I deserved decency,

And that “I love you” means nothing when you cannot show it.

So I said what I felt:

Nothing.