This how the people in your life become smoke residing in your rib cage.
You let them in with smiles and sweet words whispered on your skin.
Arms that give you shelter, grasping every inch of you,
sometimes just too tightly until you can't breathe.
Until soft pellets falling on their skin,
like rain in the summer.
Unwanted.
Loyal to a fault.
The sweet whispers turn into missed phone calls,
the smiles into snarls.
Your presence awkward.
Until you are talking yourself out of a panic attack,
realizing you are alone.
Until the scars on your body from silent shrugs and rolled eyes
suffocate you like iron hands around your throat.
A sense of drowning in a sea of betrayal,
the people who have left you
have now become ash
and I swear I can feel them burning at the back of my mouth.
