These are all languages we know. Myriad different ways to try to tell each other all the brittle things we cannot make understood in the space between our hardened eyes. I knew a language once, made up of words and simple smiles and it told stories.

This is not that. This is this.

This is a different language, full of all that I have left to say to you. I cannot make this list from words because they cut too harshly, and only aggravate the distance. I'm writing you a letter in flashing brushstrokes, melting down every possible angle of your skin into a color and another and another, thickly overlaid and full of wrath, of love, of trying to comprehend.

Melting you. Melting you down into your skin in the only way I still know how.

Maybe you won't hear my words in this new language. Maybe you'll see it as only another pretty picture, ugly in its own horrible way, but never in a way you would want to understand. Maybe you'll be too walled off still to bring yourself to look at it at all. But it's possible, just possible, that you may be capable of translating what I've given you into another language, the language of your heart that you meticulously evacuated and barred me from so very long ago. Maybe you can make this language I've invented into something you can understand, and finally -- finally we can speak again.

But no longer with the words that we used to use.

No longer in the language of lovers, but in cautious tones, veiled meanings, hidden aching hurts that cannot be exposed right now. I can tell you of the words that ripped me open time and time and time again, curling computer print-outs bundled in neat red ribbon that I can't throw out, sitting in a corner of my room. Words I cannot bring myself to burn, no matter how much I'd love to watch turn to carbon all these things that I've been longing to destroy.

I printed out these words because they touched me, and I could not let go of that even though I cannot look at them through these eyes.

I'm tired of you trying to hurt me, and of my any act of reconciliation becoming only another attack. And so I'll try just one more time....

Take my words and see what they may mean to you. I've wrapped them as best I know how and hope that they will be a bridge. A way of crossing over that says everything without needing to say that which we cannot.

Take these words.

You'll find them as they're blowing in the wind.