A fingernail flipping up, or hanging, or a scratched cuticle; a sore in your mouth or on the tips of your fingers.

That's what it's like to know truth, and live a lie, day in and day out. To be one of a million instead of one in a million. 

It doesn't hurt to say goodbye the same way you expect a fall to hurt, and leave you breathless; to leave you wheezing, pathetic, and reeling. You expect it to keep you up at night. You expect it to make you cry just once.

What hurts so much more than that is the unexpected, recurring, resilient conscious pain. Much like the hangnail, you feel like the hanged man, wretched and stretched too painfully thin- jutting out uncomfortably from the realm of yourself. You want to branch off, and break free of every single dish and day and memory. You want to burn off your fingerprints, and never be the same.

What hurts the most instead of saying goodbye, is saying hello, again and again.
And every time I hear your name,
it just reminds me of the day when we breathed out each other.
For good, for life; no more second tries at second dates.
No more us.

And that's why it sounds like piano wire every time I see you,
in the arms of someone else.