It's not that i don't love you.
It's the sound i heard when i was nine and my father slammed the front door so hard behind him i swear to god it shook the whole apartment. For the next three years i watched my mother break her teeth on vodka bottles with that new guy of hers. I think she stopped breathing when he had left. I think part of her died when he did too. I think he took her heart with him when he drove down to the south state. Her chest is empty, just a shattered mess of cracked ribs and sleeping pills.
It's not that i don't love you. It's the blood in the sink. It's the night that i spent 12 hours in the emergency room waiting to see if my best friend was going to be okay, after the boy she loved, told her that he didn't love her anymore. It's the crying, and the fluorescent lights, and white sneakers and pale faces and shaky breaths and blood. So much blood. All of it.
It's not that i don't love you. It's the time i had to stay up for two days straight with my cousin while she cried and shrieked and threw up on my bedroom floor because her boyfriend fucked his ex. I swear to god she still has tear streaks stained on her cheeks. I think when you love someone, it never really goes away.
It's not that i don't love you. It's the six weeks we had a substitute in the fourth grade because our teacher was gettig divorced and couldn't handle getting out of bed. When she came back she was smiling. But her hands shook so hard when she held her coffee, you could see that something was broken inside. And sometimes when things break, you can't fix them. Nothing ever goes back to how it was. I got an 98 that year. I think her head was spinning too hard to read any essays.
It's not that i don't love you. It's that i do.
