There’s a thin line between “am I healed?” and “have I numbed the pain?”. There’s a message I wrote for myself that I buried at the creek I used to go to lift off the heavyweight on my shoulders. There’s a pen somewhere, a fountain pen that I used to write with, and it’s long gone since I never wrote for anyone — for anything — anymore. There’s a person in my heart — a person that I could no longer recognize, there’s a make-believe feeling that is still there because there is never a reason for me to just let go of it.

My heart is hollow. I have loved enough. I have loved nothing for the past year — and I have loved that nothing with such great and vast amount. I have loved nothing beyond measure. No person, no silhouette of a person, no image of a person, no telltale of a person, nothing. My heart beats for the feeling of nothing, the serenity of nothing, the solitude of nothing; and it beats hard like it pounds.

I have so much love to give. I would write, I would sing, I would cook, and I would succumb to the cloying amount of mundanity for my loved one. I would giggle every time my name is mentioned, every time a syllable of my name rolls out his tongue, and I would lift my right leg every time we kissed like an obnoxious scene from an obnoxious movie.

I would love like a teenager. I would squirm like a puppy. I would cry like a baby. I would comfort like a mother. I would care like a father. I would love you like a poet. I would love him from all sides — even the wrong ones. I would say things to him that were better left unsaid. I would love every part of him that was kept unloved for ages. I would love him terribly.

Yet I still have nothing. There’s a vacant space inside my heart that I don’t think can ever be filled. I cherish my quiet life, my dusty bookshelf, my dustier floors, and my quieter cellphone. No sense of accountability, no good morning texts, no “have you eaten yet?”, no sense of vague questions in a much more vivid relationship.

But I would still love hard (and let this feeling bottle up until it can no longer be contained.)