An Open Letter to a Boy Who Refuses Love

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, more like mentally sorting
and a recurring thought is your hands
but don’t get too excited now, not in a good way.
I keep getting flashes of your hand holding mine,
strangling it almost
how in genuinely you gripped my wonder
and tried to force-feed it danger with your callused skin
I remember us walking on the beach
how you pulled me along behind you like I was a dog you were sick of taking for walks
how when we hugged it was like a storm was coming and we both knew we had to take cover soon
You were never sure about me,
which made me so desperately want to be sure about you
with everything I was.
But when I met your parents, you introduced me like I was a charity project,
ashamed
I convinced myself you were just shy,
you’d never brought someone like me home before.
Your parents looked at me like I was an ocean and wondered why I was spending my time with a rain drop
Part of me was right,
You had never brought someone like me home before-
you hadn’t brought much of anyone home,
all you were filled up with were broken pieces of girls that you kissed for a night,
spilling charming nothings into their heads,
leaving them to believe you were more than an empty boy with gaping holes where your emotions used to be
I believed it too for a while, at least I wanted to.
I wanted to think that you were this hurricane stricken town,
that when I cleaned up the rubble I would see all of the hope still left
the pieces of buildings still standing
But I stripped you bare,
down to the very goosebumps of your biggest fears
and you were still nothing but a valley of broken promises,
erupting like a volcano that would never stop spilling lava into everything that tried to love you
I saw some beauty in you, I really did,
in the honesty of your laugh, the insecurity behind your tears
But in the end, I could not keep hacking away at a tree I could never chop down
And if you think that writing this is my closure,
you couldn’t be more wrong,
My closure came long ago,
When I realized that you thought of me as a raindrop,
while I am the whole ocean,
and you will never be able to know the beauty of my waves