You caught your breath. Your eyes shifted downwards and upwards and all around the room, as if you were looking for the truth. You pushed your back against the cold wall. You hesitated. You hesitated because like your eyes, you wanted to find the truth within your voice. You wanted to tell me the truth.
           You stuck your hand within the depths of your insides. It went through your esophagus, looking for the words to help you voice it out. Through your stomach, the acid changed its pH levels, so your hand wouldn’t catch on fire like my heart when you came my way. Once the acid was neutral, butterflies danced in and around your fingertips because butterflies help to make you soft-spoken. And in the pits of your stomach, you finally found them. You found a whole dictionary, you skimmed through it so you can express how you felt about me. But even then, you couldn’t tell me.
          You were saying things, you told me that you felt the same way. You told me you weren’t an expressive person. You told me you couldn’t handle relationships. You told me it scared you. You told me that you were back to square one. Commitment. Commitment. Commitment. The one word you found within the thousands of pages filled with millions of other terms and definitions to explain to me how you felt. And you picked that one. And it wasn’t what I expected.
          You filled my head with ideas, I went along with it and filled in more. More than what my imagination could take, I called myself an artist. All because of the beautiful picture I painted of us. Of what I wanted for us to be. Someone told me, “a picture can paint a thousand words.” This one had only painted three. “I don’t know.” It was a painting of an accumulation of other paintings. You weren’t the only one who was running in circles, I was too. I tried to make it into something I thought was beautiful, but as I looked closer to it, as I analyzed more of my technique, I realized it wasn’t worth it. And so I ripped through the canvas, I ripped through the plastered off-white colored paper. The painting slowly fell on the ground, suddenly, gravity wasn’t as heavy as the words you laid on me that night. And suddenly, the weight on my shoulders wasn’t either.