I Am Not Sure If This Is Love

He always told me we should never love each other. We would hold hands when we walked down the street, and up the two concrete steps that were rough and scalding hot on my bare feet Mid-July when there were no clouds to block the sun’s rays from shining on us and putting his lies in the light for the world to see. The crooked door with the wooden handle gave us splinters unless we held it right. It would open smoothly until it got stuck on the floor board half way through and we had to slide in sideways to enter With him gripping my hand the whole way in. He would turn on the lights and they flickered once, twice, three times before they lit up the room and made his blue eyes sparkle and shine. But then he would let go of the door and it would slam shut, pushing away the neighbors and covering their eyes with a blindfold of darkness so they could not look inside. And he dropped my hand from his grasp like he did every night. We had to hide from the eyes that he thought were desperately trying to look in, we only needed to be in love for the world. And I believed in him and the way that he held my hand outside like he was proud to have me. My hand was numb from the tightness of his grip but I let that pain sink to the bottom of my stomach like a wrecked ship in the roaring sea. Dragging down the ship was an anchor of doubt. A lingering question kept me up until I could see the sun peeking out from behind the trees, The question of why he was only proud when under the inspection of eyes that did not belong to me. Why he told me not to love him, but to be with him forever. Because he needs me, he still claims, I have to belong to him in every way. And on another endless night of lust slowly being lost and myself asking him the same question that I continue to ask him every night he says to me, “But love is just possession.” And I bury the answer deep within my soul with all of the same answers that live there. But with each one a day older than the next they rot and decay and eventually disintegrate, Like a metaphor of what he is doing to me.