By Audrey Lambert, TIWP Student

I hate to admit that I miss you, that my feelings for you still haven’t changed, that when I think of you I get this unbelievably giddy feeling. But giddy isn’t the right word. It’s like my heart has reached past the point of beating too fast and its movements become liquid, like it has been dropped in a blender and then churned until smooth, but the blades keep spinning once its reached its desired consistency. It feels like my chest is getting smaller while my heart is simultaneously getting bigger and it begins to feel claustrophobic, like my own feelings have walls closing in upon them, like my heart is fluttering but it has nowhere to flutter to. This feeling gets overgrown, roots spilling from its planter box, splitting wood and worming through cracks, weeds growing through every square inch of soil.

I hate how my mind is often plagued with images of you. Visions of your smile and your eyes the basis of all my dreams. You never leave my mind, but why would you have to go?

I hate how you make me melt. You make my brain feel like a dreamsicle left too long in the sun, a sticky mess. I miss your tangerine flavored lips and your scent of dewy honeysuckle. I hate the phantom of your scorching touch that entranced me. Wrapping me up in your sugar coated spider-web, cutting off the circulation in my legs as I collapse to the floor in a coddled pile of mush.

I hate that you make me feel so clueless. I feel like I’m trapped under a thousand layers of wet tissue paper, suffocating under the weight of a paper mache body cast. Do you dream of me at night as I dream of you? When your eyes close are you pelted with a slide show of images of me as I am of you?

I hate that I miss you, I hate how you make me feel, and most of all I hate that I love you and I hate that I am nothing but a blip of your heart beat before it regressed to never feeling for me. The concept of me is a million miles away from ever crossing your mind again, and it stings in a different form of pain in the back of my eyes, an invisible injury to match an invisible heartbreak.

I regret loving you, but I regret not asking you if you loved me back more. Do you miss me? ‘Cause I miss you.