Have you ever whispered desperate, beautifully tragic words of devotion into the abyss of what you once knew as love? Have you ever continued to do so even as their words tore your very soul to pieces?

Has your bruised chest ever throbbed with an agony so profound, so catastrophic, that you gasped for air, convinced the sheer suffocating weight of your grief would finally return you to the ground you came from?

The sad parts are the moments I feel the painful irony of guilty for missing love less with every setting sun my head and heart align more each day attempting an unstable truce while continuing to fracture at odds in new and different ways never fully allowing me my freedom

Were I to cry to the galaxies that we were destined for one another would love itself cackle in my face? Would its captivating eyes grow cold freezing me out with a distant scorn? Would love want me less?

And so with trembling hands, I strip the sacred meaning from the masterpieces of art that once wore the soft aroma of what love and I used to be. I do so in order to drug my aching soul, in order to satisfy my ravenous and raging mind, in order to fill the cavern of my empty heart

The monuments of love and I, the work that held much prestige within me now worn to nothing but what once was and what “can no longer be” Worn to ashes of a love lit aflame and quenched

Loneliness itself does not trouble the fortress of this burnt heart. It never has, and it never will. But oh, the longing and oh, the agonizing, unquenchable, insatiable yearning to steal just one more maddening taste of the elixir that once breathed life into my veins.

Some may attempt to chain this divine suffering to the pedestrian label of "limerence" but I am a creature, far too shattered, to ever be bound by any limiting cages.

Tragically, Berry