“The thing about these poems is that you can practically feel the sadness bleeding out of them.

Like the way that ink bleeds onto a page.

And I kept going back to those wells searching for another form of self-harm,

Another way to tear open my veins without using a razor blade.

And I found it, in you, in the words that I wrote down onto paper that was creased from how often I folded it.

That was the kind of pain I needed. The kind that you can’t fix with salve and a band aid.

Aches that lodge in the recesses of your mind and take up residence in the cracked walls of your heart.

The scars that you can’t see always take the longest to heal.”