Drowning

Maybe the truth is this... I am too much, and not in the poetic way, but in the way that destroys whatever comes close. A force without a place to rest. A flame no one can hold without blistering. I feel disaster where others feel inconvenience. I erupt over a hairline crack. What is a tremor to them is an earthquake breaking open my ribs. I know it. I see it. I watch them flinch from the aftershocks. They say they can handle me, but promises buckle under pressure, and I can already hear the steel bending. I see the distance shifting, stretching, the silence forming like a bruise between us, darkening every time I open myself more. The floodgate inside me is splitting, and the water doesn’t care who it drags under. They stand there, shaking, trying to hold the gate shut with hands meant for small storms, not the tidal wave of me. And I can’t get close. I can only watch. Watch as they lose their footing, watch as the current shreds their strength. Watch as their actions betray the truth their words won’t say aloud. They want to let go. And a cold, cracked part of me wants them to. Wants the inevitable to finally happen instead of stretching out this slow, excruciating unraveling. Wants the snap, the break, the ending... a clean sever instead of this dragging death. Because clinging to me is killing us both. But another part, pathetic, starving, shameless... still imagines them learning to breathe underwater. Still imagines them diving into my depths instead of retreating to safety. Still imagines rescue, as if rescue has ever been mine. But they won’t. They can’t. They were never made for this. And the truth lands heavy, merciless... I am drowning alone in a sea that no one will enter, and the only hands reaching for me are my own sinking ones. There is no rescue coming. There never was.