Maybe I Am The Poison

(After “I’m Nobody! Who Are you? (260) by Emily Dickinson)

Maybe I am just over-dramatic.

Maybe I have been living in the past.

Maybe I am the one with the problem.

Maybe everything that was wrong with us

was just what was wrong within

Me.

Maybe I am the poison,

when all of these years, I have always thought myself the antidote.

Maybe I am the purveyor of pain.

Mine.

Yours.

Everyone I touch turns to ash.

I am so cold,

yet, my tongue burns even hotter than the sun.

Maybe it was all my fault.

Maybe I have been victim-blaming the wrong victim.

Maybe I abandoned myself years ago,

long before you or he or anyone else ever could.

Maybe who I am right now was never who I was supposed to be,

or maybe this is just who I have always been.

Nothing.

Nobody.

In the words of dear old Emily, are you nobody, too?

Or did I make you that way?

Did I take and take and take until the only thing you had left were the feet that took you away from me?

Did I take all of your good and replace it with all of my bad?

Maybe you were mine before we ever had a chance to become us.

I don’t think there was ever truly any “us.”

There was you.

And there was me.

A pair of nobodies.

Just trying so desperately to become someone else.

I admired.

I took.

I left you no choice but to leave.

I had to move on.

I needed more.

Maybe it was never that you or he or they were not enough.

Maybe it was me

that was always

too

much.