(I'll Be) The Death of You

      I touched on your story a time or two before. Left little snippets here and there, hoping someone would read them and give me some kind of insight into the dark, downward spiral we took. It's one of those things, you know, where you want to lay blame on the superficial causes instead of digging too deep into it. Maybe I didn't want to implicate myself in your downfall, more likely though, I didn't want to implicate you. After all, it was the same fingernails that were drug down my back while we made love that popped the cap off a whole bottle of Xanax. It was the same lips that told me they loved me, that then swallowed forty-two pills while you laid in the bath. But, I haven't even broken the surface tension of the final fuck you that you left me.

      We had buried so many blades into each other, over years of our constant love-hate cycle, that by the time you started to fall making love and arguing had the same violence to them. You wanted to hurt me for the same reasons I wanted to hurt you. We were so toxic to each other, but it wasn't the bitter toxicity of our liquored-up love, it was a sweet poison. You were radiator fluid on my lips, almost sugary, almost certainly killing me, little by little. There was no distinction between a kiss and a kill for us, we preyed on each other relentlessly. Breathlessly cursing each other's names, all the while screaming them loud in ecstasy.

     Who wouldn't want that little death, that orgasmic sense of exhaustion and exaltation. I let you bury me, night after night, because I loved the energy with which you dug into me. I saw you passionate, in your love and your hate, in the way you wrapped your arms around my waist, and your fingers around my neck. I took pleasure in my pain, and you learned that from me. You yearned for that same passion in return, for me to hurt you as quickly as I would mend you. Then quicker, deeper cuts, faster movements, until we were a blur of violence and love, and no one around us could tell who was the guilty one. We were both filthy, shrouded in our sins as if they somehow protected us from the bitter truth. That there had to be an end, that there was a ceiling to our ever-escalating desire.

     I found you in the morning, and I wasn't sure whether it was love or hate you were trying to show me this time. I wanted to save you, to mend you, the way I always had before. I thought if I lied there next to you, as still as you, and just breathed. Just that slow, rhythmic motion that our love started in. It might not make sense, but I thought you would start breathing too. I was certain. I laid there for hours unmoving, watching your face, as peaceful as it had been in all our years together, and after the fighting and fucking and love and hate, I cried for the first and last time.