The sheets are everywhere as your body is tangled amongst them in a dishevelled mess. 5:22am and sleep escapes you, your whole body heaves with love for her and yet pain claws at your very being. It's dark and you can barely see but all you can taste is her. Your thoughts are awash with how she has pushed you away and her absence is afflicting your very existence.

You have lost her.

She is someone who makes you come undone at the seams. She pulls at your threads and untangles every piece, entwining them with her own until you're unsure where she ends and you begin. As though she has taken a part of you and replaced it with a part of her. But she is unwilling, unpermitting and she wants her pieces back before she has even shared them properly. She is hurting and she wants to hurt you.

She doesn't want to as much as it's that she cannot help it. So the pieces she leaves in you are sharp and cutting and maybe that is why you haven fallen in love with one who is so empty. Maybe she leaves too many of her pieces in too many people who give too little back.

You're starting to question if it is meant to be, you're starting to wonder if she is only meant to be a passing ship in the night. Or maybe you are the ship and she the lighthouse; a small beacon of light, giving off so much to you while she is so hollow inside. Maybe she had not been intended to be a permanent fixture in your life and yet you already call her home. She is home.

You are scared of her. You are scared of the way you can tell her things you do not even tell yourself. You scared of the way she has filled every waking thought and every sleeping one too. You're terrified of the way you imagine her lips against yours every moment you can and the way you think it would sound if she told you she loved you.

You lost her. She didn't say it back.

You don't think you've spoken since you left her flat. Your mouth is dry with words left unsaid and you ache as you remember how you sat against your bathroom door and cried for what could have been. It crept up on you, this feeling, like Summer to Autumn and the leaves slowly changing and falling. You fell for her like that, like the way a leaf might fall from a tree, slowly then all at once. The way you cannot breathe as you lay in your bedroom and your body shakes from how cold you feel when your skin is hot to touch makes you feel as though she has infected you. Maybe she has, maybe that's just her way.

She hasn't learnt to love herself yet. You doubt she ever will and you wonder if this is why she cannot love you back. You realise you think of her as a flower, a thing of extraordinary beauty. A rare blossom, something you do not come across more than once in a life time and some people may not see a flower like this at all. Though with such delicate rarity comes a price. Because to pick a flower is to send it to its death. To make it your own and admire it closely as so many others have tried to do will only end in regret.

You have to shower such a flower with care, lavish it with all it needs and let it find its way to you, let the blossom grow in its own time and become something you didn't quite realise it had the possibility to be.

6:02am and you still are sleepless. Tortured.

But she moves through your flat like a shadow in the night, so much so you barely register her presence at all. It's not until her teary voice is beathing your name, her pyjama clad form climbing onto your bed that you realise she is even there. She has found her own way to you, after a night as restless as your own.

"I love you."

She awaits no response and she doesnt need one. Her body sinks against yours and her head rests on your chest. She leans her head on you as though she is too tired to hold it up alone and she knows that in the morning when she has to stand alone without you to take her weight and without the sound of your heart to lull her to safety everything will hurt all over again. For now, she is yours and she loves you.

You think that is enough.