duels.

believe in the gnarled pieces of metal blown into the bodies of soldiers...

i believe we all carry our own shrapnel in one way or another...



let's fight this war of words with long drawn out phrases like "emotionally unavailable" and "fear of the unknown" and "it's not you, it's me"

let's challenge each other to a duel with swords drawn and engraved in the solid steel are the words "prophetic" and "microscopic" and "feeble" and "coward"...

let's pretend this house...is a battlefield, and we're standing on the front lines and we've both got arrows pointed at the other's heart...and on the tips of each arrow are announcements such as "i'm letting go" and "i have to hold on"...

let's make sure our blood spills in pools and spells out the lines in the paragraphs of the story that forms when we are all broken open...

for fear of each other...for love of one another...

because we do not know...what we can't feel...

and we can't feel what we won't let ourselves...

a duel to damn me...

a duel to perhaps save us all...

a duel, because scars can only be corrected when you rip the wound wide open and sew it up again...

the right way...