Is it a cop-out to never love again?

To deny any and all the possibilities of it?

Regularly battle with the idea that this is for the best: to remain vacant and hollow in interactions with others in order to protect what’s left of my particularly fragile heart.

Other times I know that those connections feed a part of me that’s nearly evaporated.

Spouts.

Knobs.

Piping.

All faulty.

All the items there to water my future.

All the items there to revitalize the drought-beaten patch, but yet the plumbing is so dismantled that to even invoke so much as a drip of H20 out of this dusty dried up hose may be impossible.

Things might have even become so tangled that by this point, any added pressure will simply cause any structural integrity to give way and burst.

Explode.

Release.

Flourish.

Let me hydrate.

Let me fucking breathe again!

This is getting tighter around my neck, it feels.

Strangled, I’m just gasping for relief at this point.

Choking on hope.

Turning blue and pale at reality.

Time to let it go.

Time to let me rest.

Love is too much work, don’t you see?

If it could all just sullenly forgot, it would be so much easier to just fade away.