"Safer In My Own Skin" by Ronn E Taylor

                                                            

        You've never loved Someone so deeply until they've
 consumed your entire being like a fine mist, covering every inch of
your nakedness.  You absorbed them in every pore, they live inside and underneath your skin. 

Their presence is so heavy in your life, that suddenly when they left your life, the entire atmosphere around you decompressed.  Making it difficult to breathe the imaginary sunshine, that surrounded them.  You ever loved like that?

When they leave your life, whether known to them, they take a part of you with them.  Doesn't matter how small or minuscule,but its a piece of you that you can never have again.   

Soon over time, others will come to carry away even more pieces until you're left a hollow shell.  Slowly reduced to be defined as a 'once' or 'other'.  You're never the same and can never be what you were. 

She was sun in my eyes.  I looked too hard, too deeply.   Now I'm blind.  Vision impaired, I've learned to embrace the subtle shades and shifting shadows of objects of past affections.  Hobbling about with mortal wounds seeping blood of optimism.  How was I made, to perish this way?  

We're all composed of odd textures and strange angles.  Constrictive shapes and harsh colors.  It was far easier to love the rough, wry edges of her, than to forgive the smooth, narrow lines that defined her.  Inside of her existed my beautiful place.  Aborted by the world and reborn inside of her, we slipped beyond our tainted selves, upside down inside the world.  Grasping tightly to anything resembling reason to keep from falling through the sky and being consumed in the heat of the sun.  

Love is insanity, a deranged arrangement; the struggle between passion and pride.  Outside of the self, exposed to harm and shame.  Free of control, free to fall apart and to re-assemble into a broken narrative.  a fragile sentence left to dangle wildly at the end of a quizzical paragraph.  I am now, the silence between the words.  Taking refuge in plain sight of the conversation without any obligation to define or struggle for clarity.  To withhold thought, to withhold opinion. 

I've abandoned that beautiful place inside of her, to wonder aimlessly.  I suppose inside every woman  exists a beautiful place.  However, now I prefer..the dry lands.  Nurtured from the stones and dust, wind nibbling feverishly upon the old bones of lovers from long ago.  I am determined to lick the very parasites from them that still contains particles of my DNA.  Maybe I can never be whole or what I once was.  But what I was, shall rest with me, not them. 

I have concluded, that no where is safer than the space of my own mind, the warmth of my own heart and the comfort of my own bed.  Fractured, yet whole, safely inside, my own skin..