Colours of angst

When your limbs crush against mine, the smell of cigarettes infiltrates my senses, and I can’t look past the holes that burn into the sheets, like the wounds that reopen every time they’re stitched back—only to ooze ivory as the word irresponsibility slips out. My tongue throws daggers, sharp, but the real wound lies deeper—beneath the words.

My forever thought, the one that I orbit around whenever a vocal cord or two rises an octave, is how words—stitches in a perception—are not just stored in the back of one’s head but are echoed, repeated, rippling. Every time disgust falls from your mouth, I feel it in my bones. I catch myself in a reflection, and the words slap me across the face, but I don’t bother smoothing out the sting. It’s a familiar sting, a scar that’s long been worn.

When those three words—eight syllables—spill through the screen, deep down, even the positive parts of me knew they weren’t true. Yet still, there was something in the way you used ‘u’ instead of ‘y’, something in the way your tone shifted that somehow washed away the sting of being lied to. The moments that once were treasured are now tangled in lies, in infidelity, in the hollow space between us where love was supposed to live. It’s a reality I can’t escape, no matter how tightly I cling to what was once real.

In that moment, I knew—being loved is a lie. I loathed the feeling of needing too much, of feeling too much. The thought of being connected—hip to hip, soul to soul—only made me sick, like something I could never control, something too close to a truth I wasn’t ready to accept. It clouded my mind with resentment and calloused it, leaving behind only the strong urge to tear myself apart. To scream. To pull out strands of hair. To do anything to escape the idea of loving and being loved, because loving me could only ever feel like a lie—a fragile thing, held together by fear, by pieces of me I no longer recognize.