it’s the sound i heard when i was 9 and my mom slammed the front door so hard behind her i swear to god it shook the whole house. for the rest of the years, i watched my father break his teeth on vodka bottles. i think he stopped breathing when she left. i think part of him died. i think she took his heart with her when she walked out. his chest is empty, just a shattered mess or cracked ribs and depression pills.
it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s all the blood in the sink.
it’s the night that my dad spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if i was going to be okay, after the boy i loved, didn’t love me anymore. it’s the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. so much blood.
it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s the time that i had to stay up for two days straight with my best friend while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. i swear to god she still has tear streaks stained onto her cheeks.
i think when you love someone, it never really goes away. it’s not that i don’t love you. it’s the six weeks we had a substitute in english because our teacher was getting divorced and couldn’t handle getting out of bed. when she came back she was smiling. but her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. and sometimes when things break, you can’t fix them. nothing ever goes back to how it was. i got an a in english that year. i think her head was always spinning too hard to read any essays.
it’s not that i don’t love you.
it’s that i do."
