Boyhood Bravery

We're sitting against the stack of old newspapers I use for a dining room table and I can feel the way his eyes are burning questions into my skin; a perfect contrast to the cold air around me and I wish I could stop shaking, just for a moment. The night before he whispered words of love into the crook of my neck, but all they did was turn me cold, colder than I ever though I could be.

He loves me but he doesn't know me, doesn't see the cracks inside of my chest, hollowed out from those words uttered so many times before by so many people who were only lying. He thinks I'm some goddess, a mythical creature out to save him from everything crushing the innocence of his heart but I'm not, and I never can be. I'm not that girl, not that person. It's too much, too intense, too much of everything I can never be for someone else and all he sees is the technicolor dream of what he wishes I could be.

If he could only see, if I could only claw off this layer of skin that hides, lies, conceals everything I really am. Then he wouldn't love me.

He wouldn't.