Chapter Text

I can see through your pictures as easily as I can see through you. You want to be oh-so special and coy, while you try to appease and please everyone. Do you think I can't count the number of times you've rewound just to say the right thing at the right time? Maybe this once you'll like me – you think, maybe this once you'll love me – you try.

So you rewind to save me, you rewind to kiss me, you rewind to love me, you rewind to make me love you.

And I could fall for your eagerness, for your selfless selfishness, for the way you destroy the world and time to keep me alive.

Your hand grasping the air, grasping at my affection.

And I scream I'm not worth it, and I stand on train tracks by accident, stand away from you.

Cause I wish you gave up - no matter how many times you rewind you can't fix this, neither time nor me.

After all, you can save me from a gun, from a train, from my own stupidity but you can't really save me from myself.

From feeling lost, drowning and burning.

From feeling like I had a chance at happiness and wasted it. So I get wasted to forget it, forget her smile looking through an empty wine bottle, and then write a love message-in-a-bottle and throw it at the storm you created trying to rewind the blood on bathroom tiles – too bad you can't rewind the blood on my hands. Maybe if I had said yes and ran away on the night ashes fell from the sky like burning snow, like my burning heart, like the burning forest and this burning storm. Would we be driving away into the burning sunset? Would you be here, with me, chasing my love? Cause you can take a million pictures of us and I'll still be a ghost in your bed and heart.

I'm torn between ripping the camera from your hands and throwing it against the wall to watch your heart shatter with it, and kissing you a million times like a million pictures to make me love you. And maybe then I would be the one being shattered.

I wanna love you with all my burning heart but all I can manage are ashes like speckles of dust on your lenses, ruining your pictures, ruining you.

Instant photographs of an instant with her, an instance of love - an instant with you - I'm dancing and high on pain and love for her and forgetfulness of what it felt like to be so happy that falling stars were wishes and not dying hearts.

Cause I'm too young to be burning away and flying away and wasting away, and you're too young to be hiding behind a love I don't deserve.

I tried too hard to make you happy - pretended to be careless and wild to make you laugh - like it wasn't a practical joke on my tears.

And you believed it - and I laughed harder - cried harder - and I believed it - so desperate to be the Chloe of our childhood - wild because she was free not because she was devoured by bright burning forests.

I feel like I was cheating you out of feelings I couldn't have.

When did you find out? Did the storm whisper you my desperation for your uncharred heart? Did you get tired of rewinding through my tears - through my graves? Did the rewound falling stars look like small fires in my eyes?

And I fell into another grave, I fell in love and out of love and out of life and higher away from you - into your arms - into the storm breaking us apart.

You shattered time one last time – the storm roared and devoured us – you bled, and I was burning away on a bathroom floor.

I'm grasping for air, grasping at her affection.

I wish you hadn't given up. I wish you rewound enough to destroy the world and time for her. Maybe then I could have loved you.