When you’re caught in the space between
romance and addiction,
you forget how to listen,
how to speak,
how to be.
You think you’re in love
but not with yourself.
Your heart and your mind, they tell you what’s real
but all you can hear is the loathing you feel
for yourself and for everything
that you are not.
Addiction is obsession, and dependency is death,
because you think you can’t live
if they leave you
so you take the torture of the lies they speak
and you thank them
when they pour the salt of an ocean’s worth of tears
into the scars they inflict on you. 
But if only you could hear, you would find that
it isn’t your heart speaking; it’s fear.
It’s the fear that you aren’t good enough to be loved
and that your worth is equal to the opinions of a lover
who can’t be anything but cruel.
Fear and love, they speak a similar language
and if you’re not paying attention,
you’ll miss the signs,
misread the signals printed in your mind’s eye
in a foreign tongue,
the language of self-love.