We are all endlessly soft for someone.

You would love them in the middle of the night if they came to your door, slurring and bloodshot. You would love them in the middle of a war with carnage all around you, gunpowder coating your lips. You would love them sick, tired, full of hate. You would love love love them. Endlessly. Your nerve endings are exhausted from begging you to stop. But loving them is like lighting yourself on fire, it is the most beautiful pain you can imagine.

For everyone else, you are the girl who runs with wolves, howling at the moon, all strength and fight and pride.

But for them, you lay at their feet like a stray dog. Running after them begging for scraps of their affection. Love could turn to hate, poisoned with harsh words and still you’d stay; whimpering love me, love me, love me.

Maybe there are people who stay inside us, haunting the space between our ribs but never solid enough to wrap their phantom hands around our hearts. Their presence leaves you breathless some days. Suffocating you with their sheer thereness. Because they are there, in everything. It has been weeks, months, years, but they move your pen as though they are next to you still.