it’s like someone told me once to lean into the pain

now i am always leaning into the pain
i am leaning in too much
i am sticking my neck out and playing chicken with pain

i am shouting come and get me cunts to pain
you let me dive recklessly into your life

despite your severe and life threatening allergies to sentiment
you are macaulay culkin in my girl

and everything i say is bees
i say a minor catastrophe

could do you so much good
we are signing an extended lease together

the same time each of us are buying one-way tickets

to separate continents
it’s like the concept of not waking up next to you every morning

feels like being dragged through miles of broken glass

but it seems senseless to labor the point
it’s like i love you in the way

that my brain is yet to process you will one day die

like you casually mention you won’t live forever

and i feel a deep searing betrayal at the suggestion
it’s like hello

nice to meet you

are you mad at me
it’s like our wedding day arrives after years

and it seems necessary to ask if you actually like me

or if you’ve just been excessively polite

for a worrying length of time
if this was a complex joke

you’ve been pulling for several years

at the expense of basically all other aspects of your life
come and get me cunts
anyway
it’s not that i want to be validated

by external sources
it’s just that

have you looked at the internal sources
i want you to love me in such a way

that it positively baffles modern science

sending lab-coated professors into fits of utter bewilderment

as they crunch the numbers on our courtship with abject futility
i want you to love me like love is a thylacine

and despite credible evidence of total extinction

we’ve discovered the last surviving one

and killed it
i want you to love me

like i am always leaning into the

pain too much come and get me cunts

and you’re not scared by it

or feel an embarrassing need to make me feel better
like you’ve accepted that we can’t make anyone feel better

we can only make them less alone

and even then who knows how much or for how long
i want you to love me like i’m not a project

you hope might one day achieve sustainability
i want you to love me like it’s no big deal