The soil of my heart has become an abandoned burial ground for your discarded lust and temporary intrigue - unfortunately I play housekeeper, I plant and sow the seeds for the next dangerously close encounter you’ll inevitably come to regret. I hose down the rusted engravings marking areas in which we’d laughed in such a way that the notes intertwined and formed vines cascading the memories. I clip thorns when you’re watching and intentionally prick myself when you’re not so that if nothing else, the scars will reassure me; placeholders for the words you’d refused to speak. I rake leaves into piles of ambivalence split between the red/brown dust of admiration I am unable to withhold from you. I cut blades of grass individually hoping that the time spent doing so will turn my absence into a glaring heat lamp directed purposefully at your bed and you will succumb to giving me the favour of asking for my help. When you do so, I’ll watch absentmindedly as the anticipation rains down and frees you from having to look me in the eye on your way out. As I am left to pick at the soil clustered beneath my fingertips, occasionally outline the scars where thorns polka-dotted my skin, rip down vines and bathe in the residual ache between my shoulder blades as they grow back and maybe, hopefully reattach the leaves to skeletal like trees and wish wistfully for once that they might grow in spite of you as opposed to alongside you.