Adunola,

I want to love you to full measure. I think I know how to love you better than I know how to love myself, even, but I cannot allow that, because you will take and take and take. And you really just want someone who knows how to push back, so you can have a reason to rage and war. I am cursed with the temperament that means I am perfect for this, the sort that means I will sink my teeth in just as firmly as you sink yours into me. I make you feel less like a bully, in return that makes you feel more justified in the biting. I know this, and yet I stick around. Lord knows I love you. I love you enough to have held on to your breadknife all this time as the serrated edges cause bleed-inducing friction as we tug on it. I showed up to love you, even in discomfort and punishment, even through mutilation. I forget/forgot that your love leaves me in fleshy little mounds that take forever to crawl back towards each other and reattach. Or maybe you are right and it’s me, and it does take work to get used to me and love me. You might be right and I am hard to love and regrettable, but I don’t trust one bit of data to be factual when there is a whole pool saying otherwise. Easy easy easy easy easy easy easy h-easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy easy hard easy easy easy easy easy.

There are more chances of you being an anomaly than correct.

Where does one go when home is a touchy place? How do I find rest where you are? You go out of your way to arrange thumbtacks on the places you know I tread and wilfully glue nails to your bosom when I want to come in for a hug. I don’t want to suffer to prove my merit. I don’t want to suffer to prove my merit and still I hold you gingerly when the periodical sorrow and pains of living and growing grab you by the side. I am perforated by the contact and still I try. Still I linger. I love you, but I need to live. I need to live and the vice-like grip you have on my neck will not let me. All the blood you are letting of me will not allow me. I miss you, I miss my bleeding. It’s been what? Two days? I miss you so sorely, because even though I will never call, I liked knowing that there was a bosom to run into, however prickly.

The dawn is singing again and I want to forgive you but this time you launched me from you unaffectionately. It made me wonder if I am easy to discard. To let go of, ignore and dismiss. You know that I am a soft and delicate thing and I will calcify around all of the damage that I suffer. It is what you call resentment, this hardening. If you finish me and I stop having any softness, do you know I will no longer be called in, and my name will no longer be true? I do not want to be a liar by consequence of loving you but I am hardening with each pummel and you are simultaneously the only one that can soothe me and the person I trust the least to do so.

I think about the droplets of water that make up the ocean that I am, and the many waves of my nature. The several moons that pull my tide and swell me. The ones that cause me to change and alter in intensity and capacity.

Fear propels me the least. I promise I have thought about this a lot, intensely and with the most persistence, and I always find myself back at the exact same point. Threats feel like insults, an opportunity to exercise my choice to only do what I want. In fact, with the right threat, the consequence is a pleasure to endure. Which is perhaps why I have been in many of the positions I have been in.

I told you; do not threaten me with your presence or absence, because then I will enjoy it, almost entirely out of aversion to the trepidation you were trying to incite in me. Do not threaten me with your belief of my inability, or question my faith in my ability. Do not threaten my dependence on you with intentional absence, because I will agree with you and show you how much I can do without you. Do not try to leverage my love for you to pummel me into compliance, because, haha, funny story, I will just become even lukewarm, indifferent; show you the only love I acquiesce to is one of my choosing. I have stopped choosing yours—or at least I am trying to.

You have been my hero for all of my life, the embodiment of ambition and the dreams I permit(ed) to have their reckless way with me. You are the embodiment of every career day for the utter strength of your arms and your spirit, the culmination of which made me feel like movement was possible; anything was. I want more out of this my life, more than you want of yours, and I am under a lot of pressure, staggering under the weight of all of this expectation and my own hunger for you to look at me once the way I constantly look at you, this want for you to seek me the way I am constantly, endlessly, looking for you. My ears are ringing from all of this seeking and screaming and squealing, but if you hear any of it, you are silent, like always. Such a lonely presence, yours. Such a definitive loneliness time with you is. How I wish it was different; you, me, all of it.