From the Heart.

It was something from the heart.
Right from the arteries, the veins and the flesh shouting and moaning with the screams of a thousand babies and a million sighs; it was from the core of life itself.
Pete wanted his Patrick to know that but he couldn't. Words don't work anymore since Patrick sung them all the time; they lost their colors to him. To Patrick, his words are just songs now; nothing more and nothing less.
He loved his Patrick but he couldn't say it enough. He said it all the time, he muttered it, he wrote it, he scribbled it all over his other neglected words. He didn't know how to say three stupid words in ways other than his overused ones.
He wasn't just a boy in love; he's a boy trying to figure the world out. Break the puzzle piece by piece and word it down and now this hits him over the head and sends his world into blank spirals; like the pages of a notebook yearning to be filled out. He could write it better than you ever felt it but could he actually feel it?
That was today's puzzle. How can he show Patrick how much he loved him?

*

Romance's long dead and buried; he knew that much. But somehow love still survived the massacre of emotion that went through his eyes. It's just a word, just an emotion, just a feeling of gushing gasped breaths beating down his chest and flooding his lungs whenever he realizes that he can't get rid of this obsession with love.

Why can't his picture leave my mind?
You're in love.
Why can't I think about anything but him?
You're in love.
Why can't I be happy without him?
You're in love.

His brain is going through overdrive, trying to work this out. Nothing worked with this love dilemma. All he had was words words words and more words and ink. He wrote I love you's all over his arms and all over his palms so that they made pretty inverse letters in every color he could lay his hands on, black, blue, splashy-soda orange, aubergine -distorted purple and the brightest blood red. Everything his hands touched now had tattoos of what he could do best. Write write write. But somehow he couldn't find another word for this word; affection? Adoration? Lust? Hate?
One word has so much invested in it; generation died because of this love or what was love.
Love's just a hair away from hate. Two extremes, each usually leading to the other.

Hate has always been easier for him, trash talking and writing hurtful things and just imagining bloody insides and hacked bodies. But with love... puppies and pink ruffles never come as easy.
It doesn't make any sense anymore.
Every thing and puzzle piece he took apart wasn't like what everyone else said. They said money brought happiness, it didn't. That loneliness was misery, it isn't. It was all the other way around. You're happy when you're drowning in your misery.

Was loving Patrick really hating him?
Pete just fell in love like everyone told him to; how he saw everyone else falling in love.
Was he really in hate-coated love?
Or in love-coated hate?

*

There he was now. Sighing and looking down on the colors swirling into the clear water as they washed off his bare arms and hands.
"This was stupid..." he stated to the mirror. "So stupid and not worth the effor..." His disappointed faded out words took a halt in sync with the sound of splashing discolored water being swallowed by the hungry drain.
Emotions so complex weren't meant to be worded it seems; even if he tried to do it so many times. They were meant to crawl in the folds of your heart and stay there.
Maybe ripping open a ribcage would solve all his problems. A smirk ran over his lips as he wiped away the remaining mingled colors and words with a -now previously white- hand towel. He placed it on the counter and left, leaving all his I love you's in a heap of damp fabric and a collision of black, orange and aubergine sharpie remains.

So he's sitting all alone with his thoughts of love-hate extremes and one hell of a headache wrapped around his casually warped mind with puzzles everywhere under and behind his sight. Maybe some blank puzzles and empty riddles weren't meant to be solved. Some were made to fuck up with minds like this love deal. You read the questions and the rhymes over and over again but you get nowhere; you just have to be satisfied with how beautifully worded and futile they are.

"Pete? You here?"

Wish I weren't though.
"Yeah, over here." He did a half-hearted unseen gesture, resuming his thoughts. Now he's just confused what to call this gush of sensations draining out his composure in pretty disfigured colors down a deep black unknown in the middle of the space where his heart is supposedly is. Right below the ribs; and he wondered: what the fuck is going on under there?
It's like a cage fight but with less bursting gashes and mock-knives.

His boyfriend entered the room, face radiant and overjoyed, almost too overjoyed as he went on with the process of taking his attire off and peeling away all traces of the tiring outer world.

"You look like you're high as a kite," Pete's snarky comment catches him off-guard but it only makes him smile and continue what he's doing.
The kind of happy that comes with misery? Or the kind of happy that comes with packs of sunshine?
All that comes out is hatehatehatehate now. No love words. Words don't work anymore for him.

Love's just a hair away from hate. While sexuality is a form of repulsion.
And it can shift at any time.

"Patrick?" Pete mutters, twirling a lock of his hair carelessly now; staring at nothing and everything all at once.

"Yeah, babe?" Patrick mutters back, entangled within his shirt.

"I hate you," he simply states, not taking his eyes off anything and everything: seeing the big big picture now.

And Patrick continues taking off his clothes.
Sometimes one extreme means the other.

"I know." Pick your meaning.