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it is hard to make poetry, she writes, when things are tugging and whispering and kicking at you, and the touch of the words on your skin won't relent for you to separate them into sense. it is hard to make poetry, for her at least, when she is breaking a promise she made and letting him eat away at her life. absorbing, yes, she is beginning to be absorbed, the sun on hot asphalt, water on a sponge, any metaphor you like.

it is this thing called love – she begins, and the thought of him and love tangled in the same sentence hooks that self-mocking quirk into her mouth. her face is expressive, she is told, but she has made up expressions for her emotions that no one else fits together, or maybe it's just that no one else looks. regardless, her secret is safe.

it is the wondering that damns her, the how long, how much, how come, the questions bubbling up or raining down or coming at her sideways like snow in whistling winds. but it's the not having answers that saves her, because answers mean that this is real, this isn't real, they would pull her up or down into a world of concrete where she would have to make decisions. it's the non-answers that enable her to keep herself at a distance.

she tries, in her way, to be brave, but no, she doesn't really, not even a little, she gives up her soul to be safe. she wears the futility of her affections as armour against anything she could actually touch. layer upon layer of protection she heaps on, remembering from her books and movies that the right person always comes to break them down. (that sentence, she writes in the margin, was meant in a kind of caustic irony.) she remembers giving him the keys to all her codes, tearing down her walls with a show of reluctance, in hope that what they protected was precious enough to seek.

it's writing like this, fluid and disjointed and brutally honest in that random offhand way that she hates reading because you never really know what happened, it's writing like this that maybe, possibly helps. she thinks, maybe, that since it's words (it was always words, for years and years, pages and pages of TrueType fonts), since it's words, then maybe at least she can make her words mean more in her head than his. so that's how she ends this, on one of those ambiguous notes that she hates, because you never know whether it turned out all right or not.

because really, even when this ends, neither will she.