And here's my most creative, most brilliant self, running on no hours of sleep.

 

Here goes:

 

 

We began where we fell apart.

 

I can't quite gather the taste of fear into words, really.

 

Maybe I can try, with a few wistful enigmas and wild gesticulations.

 

 

Fear wasn't palpable on the tips of my numb fingers.

 

It wasn't literal in the gaps of your sporadic lashes.

 

Fear wasn't visible between our tentative glances or feverish grins.

 

No, fear wasn't corporeal.

 

Fear, in turn, was abstract.

 

It sewed itself into the words you spoke before your mind promptly, would've rejected them.

 

It was in the stilted breaths I hummed through, when I couldn't keep my feeble wrists from latching onto the pieces of your tomorrows.

 

It was shaky in the camaraderie we hid beneath -not underneath but beneath- when days would stretch on till you couldn’t bear to think about the omnipresent clash.

 

Fear, we hoped, would wash away with light spring showers.

 

 

Spring never visited your home. Nor mine.

 

 

I think, sometimes, I can hear your hesitation, diffidence, before the telltale plunge resounds of you diving in headfirst, as you picture my reflection, serene atop predatory waves.

 

 

Love on the other hand, is a funny thing.

 

My mother's sure hold onto my chubby fingers as my fleeting childhood materializes underneath my eyelids, was love.

 

The lurching of my careless heart when my dearest cartoon hero stumbles through melodramatic shortcomings, was also, maybe, love.

 

The reprimanding lilt of my towering father, unto which I based the cacophony of my existence around, while I rocked back and forth precariously on one leg of the wooden stool, was love.

 

But to this day, the faint pin pricks that felt suffocating and still does on starlit nights with the winter chill knocking on my soul, I believe was not love.

 

At six before dawn, with minutes longing for hours without the imperceptible tossing and turnings, cursing senselessly at your fragrance lingering on the pages of my skin, isn't love.

 

Because in the self-actualized epiphany of human perception and romanticism, love isn't written off as that selfish clawing at the raw bits of my jaws.

 

Love isn't smeared on to the walls as gruesome, insatiable tendrils of absolute nothingness, devouring you outside in, till what remains is but a chuckling carcass.

 

Love isn't your disillusion.

 

It is my illusion.

 

It is a rickety mast, like that of a crutch, which you cling onto when the tides rise too high above skinned thighs, climbing past mauve necks.

 

Love isn't in the sickly pallor of my track stained cheeks as I inspect my blank countenance, each nightfall.

 

Love doesn't fill me to the brim when I stall, blood trickling down my elbow from one too many scrapes against the serrated edges of your lucidity.

 

Love wasn't fear.

 

But you feared love.

 

 

Maybe I would admit, through the shy streaks of genesis, crawling through the fissures in the stagnant draperies, that I was in love with fear.

 

Fear was enticing, a little on the curve of saccharinely enthralling.

 

Fear was potent, it bore no loops and it wasn't perplexing.

 

Fear was clear and it was perpetual; never elusive from the reach of my probing fingers.

 

Fear was, in a sense, reassuring.

 

I abhorred fear with every fibre in my being but at the very same millisecond, revered on the crest of it's pledged highs.

 

It was nothing but corrupting.

 

It was divine and sickening against your chapped lips and hooded eyes.

 

Fear was everything I couldn't stand and so I adored it, instead.

 

Fear, darling who is listening with keen ears pressed up against windowsills, is subjective, so we shied away from it, naturally.

 

 

You were my fear.

 

You are my fear.

 

And I am in love with fear.

 

 

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And this is what happens when you leave Shrimp with too many fics, much too many angst fics, much too many angst fics with post feels conundrums, no sleep, too much time on her hands and a wandering conscience.

Never let me do this, again.

 

 

~M.S