everything shimmers with the painful bliss of melancholy—a shiver in my perception that holds me captivated. i wander into this inky territory and discover beautiful faces frozen into masks. your face is among them, along with the faces of others you have broken and others that have broken me. there is pain all around us. it circles us like a mythical lioness snapping her jaws. it threatens to devour us whole—or mar us with deep wounds that bleed purple.

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i fear you are the lioness with teeth so terrifying you would leave me in ruins, glittering ribbons forever ripped to pieces. i conjured this fear by conjuring an incarnation of the one you loved and then broke. she is a ghost that wanders the corners of my mind, singing songs about you, all riddled with pain, anger, and heartbreak. her voice is haunting and beautiful—and with time, i have grown to love her, to desire her melodic whispers in my ear. she is a captivating spirit that sings to me about you—the only songs in my head. she is my friend.

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it wasn’t you that inspired a conjuring of your past love. i have already been shattered by a broken person who’d broken people before she broke me, and i foolishly believed she would never break me, that our love was too magical to ever be reduced to a dust lost even to the depths of the ocean. i am already bleeding, and i cannot sustain another wound. so, i tangle myself in the memories of my first encounter with the lioness and the ghost of your past. together i let them drip the vital of melancholy into my veins. i let them spin an image of you unworthy of trust—unworthy of the trust i gifted my first heartbreaker and unworthy of the trust your first love gifted you. i let them numb me to the fear, the love—because i have desperately searched the sea of faces frozen into masks and yours hasn’t shown me how you could be any different.

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so, i listen to the whispers that tell me one day you will disappear, tempted by boredom and captivated by the fantasy you will meet someone better. so, i stay in the melancholy, and i wait to not see blue and bleed purple.