kill me with words

If you took a needle, pushed it into my skin and
watched me bleed,

If I told you it hurt, does that make me a liar?

When words fall from your lips and stick to me like thorns,
why is it my job to pull them free and tend to the wounds?

You put them there in the first place, but that doesn't matter.
If I wear my pain on my face, you roll your eyes and say,

"Oh, it's not so bad. Stop being so dramatic."

D r a m a t i c.

I hate that word.

I hate it for its glibness, the blithe dismissal that I am merely an act,
a pantomime to be mocked and forgotten within mere moments.

As if my own heart is nothing to be taken seriously.

"You're being oversensitive."

It's easy for you to say that, isn't it?
Because nobody ever sees the damage that words can do.

There are no bruises to flower on my skin, dark and wide just beneath the surface.
You cannot hear the crack of bone as my body bears the brunt of some heavy impact.

Instead, there is a gradual change.

Something in you freezes over time. What once flowed easily and with purpose becomes slow and clogs. Words stick in your throat and knot your tongue and you end up swallowing them back, sliding thick and bitter down your throat like blood.

Words fester, you see.

They writhe beneath your skin, crawl into your ear and rot you from the inside out. The pain spreads and swells with each new word that falls carelessly from your mouth.

“Don’t take it so personally.”

If only it were so easy for me to shrug off pain the way you shrug off responsibility.
It slides from you like rainwater, falling away and vanishing into nothing.

So I try to stop the bleeding and bite down hard to keep the words in.
You wonder why I can’t speak to you, why I always look like I’m in pain when you’re near.

It’s because it hurts.

Who are you to tell me it doesn't?