Metaphor

Metaphorically speaking, you rid me of my hope with the extra Drano in the sink.

The words “I miss you” roll around in my mouth like children’s medicine that refuses to be swallowed. 

I have said those cursed words so much that I tired myself of hearing them.

Saying I want you back in my life is a silver bullet on my tongue that I am afraid to fire.

When I pull the trigger, it’s one shot away from splattering the walls with the only people who didn’t melt in the forest fire of our relationship.

They tell me to go to my happy place and I dissociate.

I buried my paradise island with the skeleton of love in the graveyard of our past under a weeping willow that was once a cherry blossom.

The happiest I have been since you left has only been achieved when I stand so tall that my head gets lost in the clouds.

I’m standing on stilts and the clouds are suffocating.

I want to fall from my stilts into your ocean eyes and drown in the intoxicating sound of “Good morning, I dreamed of you.”

The closest I ever got to you was when I did dream of you and I only woke when we were centimeters from kissing.

I woke up in a sweat, tears streaming down my face.

Even my dreams are metaphors for what can never be.

What is it even supposed to mean?

My rhetorical questions want answers.

My metaphors want meaning.

My heart wants you.

I love you.

I didn’t get to hold you and yet you ripped yourself from me so quickly.

Preceding every pleading of you being in my life is a drawn out novella that disintegrates into a tragedy.

“Where hath thou gone?”

I cannot Juliet myself and you are incomparable to a summer’s day.

What once was is described as a metaphor because I cannot look at the problem through glass, but instead layers of stained windows as if the chapel of our past was rebuilt.

I pray for what I lost and that maybe one day, I’ll be able to shout my point across the pews without the silencing of vigorous figurative language.

I will take a hammer – no.

I will bulldoze – no, that’s not right either.

I will SUPPRESS the memories of you.

I will hide all that shame and guilt with the bittersweet piercing of your voice through that glass.

The transparency couldn’t even begin to differentiate from the grime in our time together and apart.

I will create a synthetic version of you.

Of the you I loved, of the you I adored, of the you I think about when I’m crying on my bathroom floor.

The tile is cold, but your heart is colder.

Soon, I’ll only remember the you that I fluffed up in metaphors.

I miss you.

Metaphorically speaking.