• You’ve always been not-quite beautiful. Your mouth is a little too small and your eyes are a little too wide and your jaw is a little too far back. Secretly, I kind of begrudge your 6.3 prettiness because everyone asks me how in the hell I landed you. Nobody understands when I tell them you’re not enough. Oh, how I resent you resent you resent you for it.

    An outsider thinks my life is charmed. You drown me in kisses, you swallow me in gifts, you bribe away my time with sweetness. Hardly. You set my neurons aflame with the pressure of loving you. My ears ring with annoyance when you call my name and my hands shake with rage when you wrap your fingers around them like they’re yours. By giving all your love away to other people you hide from your ugly flaws. You are eternally masquerading as a compassion-bloated lover, crafting a masterful illusion to all the unwitting partygoers.

    The entire meal, you sat there with an expectant look on your massive watery eyes. You’ve got me trapped, like a butterfly. You cling to my wings in a panic, desperately whispering to me in a language that insects don’t understand. You’re scared I’ll fly away, so you strike a pin through my delicate forewing and call it love. Your pitymongering tears wash my scales off so even my pathetic attempts at flapping are useless. It’s better to just settle into an emotional coma on my spot here in your menagerie, the lone exhibit in your collection.

    I left and went home to stare at the bumps on my knobby Fox&Jacobs ceiling. Every time you smile I see those twinkling, menacing pins. Every time you laugh at something I say that’s not funny you blow more thickening dust onto my little glass box. I can never leave. I can never leave. Every favor, every tender kiss, every quirky present is meticulously designed so that your perfect world can go on spinning in perfection. What kind of person would it make me if I told you that I don’t love you? Everyone loves a martyr. Nobody loves the guy who breaks up with the martyr. Before my drug-clouded eyes, the ten million little bumps on my ceiling turn into the openings of your pores, closing down and enveloping me in a saccharine sweat that stifles my agonized sobs.

    Her eyes are darting at me again. They have that shimmer that a young girl’s eyes have-- that insecure but so so pretty gleam of innocence. They do not eat me to the bones with their overwhelming passion. They do not cave in around me with their starving cries for reciprocation, for emotion, for lies and iloveyous and please never leave me. They aren’t you. I love them.

    You know. With all those muscles in your face struggling to pull up the edges of your mouth and eyes and brow, your 6.3 dips to something resembling a 5.4. You don’t say anything. You know you can’t, or a little highschool girl will break the case and take your precious butterfly away. Oh, how you resent me resent me resent me for it. Your palms sweat. Your chin quivers. You hold my hand like a tiny boy crushing the ribs of his pet hamster by mistake. You are only hanging on by the skin of your teeth, by the teeth of your skin.