It is almost three in the morning, and I am drowning in the idea of you with someone else. You cup her face in your palms, her eyebrows are bushy, just like yours. I'm scared. She looks so much like you and I can't help but to think you'd fit beside her. You're reaching for a piece of her you can trust. You love all of her. Your eyes are twin shades of honey; her kisses make your lips chatter. Her hair is coiled and kinky, longer than mine, and her body is skinny. She looks nothing like me. You have pictures of her art, praise her skills. I bet she keeps the messages of your compliments, little bedtime reminders of a girl with your hope wrapped around her ring finger.

But she will never be me. She will never put up with your shit, not like I did. She will never stick through the rollercoaster you call a life. She won't put up with the cooking, cleaning, paying for meals, paying for haircuts, rubbing your back, making sure you wake up for school and work, doing your homework for you, supporting you when you're sitting next to a worm after you've reached rock bottom, loving you during the highs, comforting you when you aren't working, and respecting your hustle when you are.

She will never kiss, suck, lick or fuck like me. Her eyes illuminate, lighthouses of foggy fear, when your nails sink into her sharp-boned thighs. There is no music, no ringing string quartet when her moans rise and fall, and her sighs are just whispers forced through her lips, a groan of black noise static. Instantly, you are deaf, and you are useless.

You need me. I know girls like her, with their good intentions and healthy hobbies and friends who sleep over on the weekends. She is chiseled diamond set in silver. She is a pink frilled bathing suit with lipgloss in the back pocket of her expensive, still distressed, jeans. When she was younger, her parents pushed her on swing sets and walked her home and she doesn’t know a thing about beauty or pain – or how those two things, so often, are very nearly the same.

Oh, you need me, and you know it more now than ever. I am dirty soles, smeared makeup, cherry lipstick stains across your wrist. I am Swisher sweet smoke, Hennessy burning, brain buzzing, body fucking aching to feel my hips roll like ocean waves. You didn’t even know a body could move like mine until you saw it – until you felt it, shivering down your spine like I’m swallowing each knot in your back. I always swallow.

You need me. You don't praise or probably even read my poetry because the thought of me laying my deepest truths between these lines keeps you awake at night, exploring your own body while remembering what it felt like to have me pull your hair and whisper your name. Like a prayer, you think. Like we are in church, your body my altar and I pray for you to “don’t stop” and you don’t. Not for a second.

You need me. You push the thought of me away because you know it’s true – that no one in this world can make you feel the way I do.

And I will keep doing it. I will keep laying at your feet, begs caught in my throat. I will smile when you slap me. I will wait, patient and good and bad, only for you. “Hurt me,” I tell you, and I want to remember the sting. I want to remember what it’s like to make you cry out in joy.

I want to remember what it’s like to sink this ship of ours. I want to remember what it’s like to shove the rest of her overboard and kiss your neck while she drowns.