When I was young
I would sit silently in my seat
Await my turn to speak whether it was given to me or not
And more often than not
I said nothing
Afraid that if I did no matter how gently I said each word, they would shatter through the cage I had locked myself in
For protection I said
The sign they had taped to the door reads sanctuary
Photo club
Here our bodies are puzzle pieces that fit together to make a picture that we hope will smile back at us
Watching the room that was meant to allow a place for me in my own heart
But these bodies, the promises that title held were a lie
Your presence here demands truth in a love that is real, but now your bodies, they crowd like crumpled bits of paper from the oath we silently undertook to be human, that as of now, fit to nothing
With my eyes I push aside the waters of this disappointing sea and– wait
Stopping and feeling the weight of inertia of discontent graze past me like a tidal wave after one elongated heart beat
you are there
You, little did I know would unfurl to be the very salvation of persistent restlessness that engulfs my mind like the mouth of a monster
I saw our anger, our tears, these things like shards of diamonds inside of us that began to buzz and riot in our minds because we trapped them there, because no one would hear us if we let them out!
They began to kindle and burn
In me, you had seen an innocence, something the world had not yet touched or what perhaps was simply the shrapnel of dreams come together again to make, something
I saw the fragments of your agony bound together by a wretchedness that disguised itself as a mother
And this thing we had we didn't know what it was so we called it friendship because we needed each other more than air
We stumbled and fell, taking on the shapes of crutches to hold each other up just enough that we didn't have to taste the blood that had escaped old wounds
And before I knew it, you had severed the baggage that for so long was clamped to your heart and lifted me up, carried me on your bones out of the deepest pit of hell where loneliness and regret and half-truths lie
And somewhere through this noble act of self-redemption we fell in love
Together we forgot that the superhero capes of our childhood didn't fit any more and ran through the woods to find insanity because it was safer than here
Where getting lost was only part of the game
Our kingdom was always peaceful and each word we uttered or whispered over the walls swelled with affection
When we looked into each other’s eyes we could never look away, entranced by the hoard of sunlight that we secretly knew we were responsible for
But long ago we had been force fed the truth, where the sun would dim and the veins of our entangled hearts would be lashed by a sharp reality
You had long ago planned to fly away with the feathers you had attached to your back with the sticky remains of what was meant to be a childhood,  
So that just maybe you could get away and maybe you could relieve yourself of some cut throat nothingness that had caged your mind to numbness
I question if this dark cloud you claimed to be flooding out your clarity was really that you had been left writhing because a lie had landed amongst your thoughts and grown like a mold so now your mind is infertile to the flowers the ideas that are so desperate to grow there
I look up into a sky composed of blue and gold and as you say "I have to go" I see in your eyes that you want me to beg you to stay but I can’t— not aloud
So in that very moment I turn my head and try not to wince as I tear a piece of parchment from my slow beating heart, and with ink I take up my pen like a sword and stain the paper with the words "I love you"
I surrender it to you like a dying breath and I can see by the gleam in your eyes that it’s not enough and you vanish
Like smoke from a star that once burned bright as it fell out of the sky
But if you were only to turn over this tiny declaration you would see the steep mountains and the deep valleys underneath my confession
With such a passion I carved these words, that my message can be read from both ends
If only you had looked closer still you would see that because I had no more ink to spare I used the tears we had shed from laughing too hard because in those moments we had forgotten all that had hurt us
I wrote it because I meant it!
But for the same reason I let you go