the storm vs. the still water

You are summer, and I am winter in all my ways.

The problem with us does not simply lie in the way we are opposites in multitudes.

It’s larger than that.

For I will always be a hurricane, and you, my dear, fucking hate storms.

The places on my body your fingertips have traced still linger and burn long afterwards. Sometimes, I swear I can still feel the kisses you loved to leave on my cheeks.

I have never been too good at letting people love me or loving them back.

Not that we were in love.

But I wanted us to be. I yearned for it, yearned for you. And we were never any good together, but I wasn’t any better alone.

Sometimes, I think I’m still not.

But I'm wrong.

I am a fucking storm and the right person will be able to weather it.

Or I will weather it alone, because I am enough.

But, sometimes, I think I still miss you and it's so ridiculous.

To miss kissing somebody who hurt me over and over again/

The first time I vividly remember you breaking my heart into millions of pieces, we were sitting in your stupid Mercedes Benz while it heavily poured outside and Tame Impala’s The Less I Know the Better served as background noise.

I had just admitted that I loved you.

Toxic red flag #39,454 of yours: You question my feelings for you over and over again until I break. I say, I love you and you look at me in such a gentle, tender way, it physically makes me sick to recall it.

You grabbed my face and kissed me like something within you might break if you didn’t, you held onto me in a way I wish I could forget, your hands gripping my face between your hands that felt soft yet desperate all at once.

You tasted like everything I should never want, like something familiar, so achingly familiar while also unlike anything I have ever known or experienced.

But you do not say I love you back, in fact, you hand me words that feel like they have thorns all over them, feel like they might just be the thing that breaks me.

But you do not let me go, you do not stop kissing me, and with us, it was never just kissing. It felt like the world stopped for me. Like time stood still, and it’s not fireworks, but god, the warmth you radiate, the way you touch me, it felt healing, it felt beautiful and the connection was just there.

But it’s not.

I’m there, and you’re not.

It’s constantly me and me alone, because loving you feels like getting caught in the rain in only a t-shirt, like you’re 5 seconds too late for the train and have to watch as the doors shut and the train whips past you, leaving only dust behind. Loving you feels like a chase I will never ever win.

You will never love me.

But the way you continue to kiss me like you could, the soft hands, the kissing all over the face and licking my body like it’s something to worship.

It’s like you're taunting me.

It's like I'm taunting myself.

I should know better.

And yet,

You kiss my face gently in the way I told you gives me butterflies and I think I hate you, actually, I know that hate you because God, I fucking hate you and I whisper it against your lips like a mantra because despite feeling used and like stupid dumbstruck love girl who never got over it, something within me burns and your lips are endlessly soft, your arms so easy to fall into, your presence, surrounding me like the kind of warmth I forgot I was allowed to have.

I hate you, I whisper desperately against your lips.

No, you whisper back with a smirk. You wish you did, though.

I feel like I never stopped falling.

I feel like you never even fell at all.