There is a point where I can feel you letting me go and I scrabble for purchase but I can’t quite hold on to you. And I say you like you are the only one to do this but I have become so familiar with this that I can feel it happening. I feel you slipping away from me and I don’t know how to hold on to you and I don’t know if there is something I’m not saying that keeps you walking away. This isn’t a novel. I don’t know the words to say that tells you to stay. I don’t know the action to take that convinces you. If I did, I would have said it, done it. But you, you, you. It’s each person who has drifted away from me. What am I doing or not doing that causes or contributes to this? Maybe I seem fun and simple but then you get to know me and I’m complex, maybe you are good with that too, then I hit a day of too little sleep and too much stress and all my emotions start racing around and I bottle it up, trying to hold it together and you ask what’s wrong, not taking my honesty pledge seriously enough, and I say everything that is eating at me and it’s like standing in front of a sandblaster. And I’m immediately regretful and I try to put us back together but now I don’t have anything to stand on but this quicksand because I know I fucked up but feel like I didn’t. That this maelstrom is a part of me, and I have to work with yours, why don’t you have to work with mine. I’m not uncomplicated, not simple, not easy. I don’t know how to get you from the slow crawl of beginning to nestled close to my heart. I don’t know how we can get there. And I am so tired of trying and failing. The people that love me but not romantically say that a person is out there, but that’s not what I feel. I feel like my person is gone, she’s not coming back. I feel like I acted with care and love and it wasn’t enough. Each time it’s not enough. I keep trying, because that’s what I am built for but, each time, it’s like a new stab wound. My heart reels back trying to heal and my mind tries to figure out what the misstep was. It never ends.