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Gore makes your guts feel all squirmy inside because you're imagining what that might look like if that were your intestines instead spilled out on the floor. Love is said to be like butterflies in your stomach, tearing you up from the inside. Blood is red, memory, stains on clothes and smears across your skin. Red is the color of love, hearts and lips and roses.
Love, they say, is supposed to ache. Love is reciprocal. Love is pleasure and pain. (Your pain, my pleasure—?)
Sorry, sorry, I just can't stop thinking about it! Teeth glinting, eyes gleaming. Is it perfume from a dress/That makes me so digress? So thick the scent in my throat. Papercut on your pinky, furrow of your brow. I think about touching you. I think about wrapping my teeth around your throat and never letting go, like lovers do.
I tried—I really did!—to write it out, compose confessions, unsent texts and misbegotten letters—nothing works, it all just makes my stomach churn. I don't want to bleed for you. I think I'm going to be sick. I think of seeing red drip dripping down your thigh and I get all stirred up. Godlike you seem to me and if you loved me back then maybe you'd bleed for me in stead.
(And maybe this sick sick sick should all stay in my head.
But how else am I supposed to understand it?)
Then again, they tell me love is not merely a feeling but action. So I'm still getting it wrong. So I still have to push it. (Please stop) and now my heart is clawing and trying to push out of my chest as the rich flavor of blood burns and my chest hurts—
Love hurts, but it's worth it. Love is everything.
So you must understand, when I gift this knife to you (softly sheathed point-first in your stomach) I'm saying I love you. You get it, right? You don't have to say it back, just prove it to me—bleed for me. I love you. I never imagined I could feel anything like this, I have to thank you somehow. (Maybe you could feel it too?)
Please, just understand:
I love you!