There Is a Piece of My Soul Somewhere in The Universe

 I don’t believe in love, not quite, not at all. Despite this, I know I must have loved someone, or something, at some point in this life. Or maybe I never did. Is there really a way to tell? There cannot be, and if there was, I do believe it would not matter if love was true, or love was not.

I don’t always believe in things that I know to be true, but then again, what do I know – knowledge evades me as water does oil. I could look at something and see it and yet it still would not exist. Or not cease to exist.

To love someone, I think, maybe I know, and I firmly believe, but also, I do not believe at all, is madness. Oh, but I am mad, am I not?

Silly notions, life.

I tore my soul apart to spread it between these two-legged, two-armed creatures that roam the world with their two eyes and one heart. Sometimes I believe that I shouldn’t have. I should have guarded it – my soul – and kept it on my person at all times, but what did I know, I placed a nail and struck the glass of it with stone. Broken, beautifully so. Painless, too, because I was willing to trade pieces of it for nothing in return. If that was love, I do not know.

Oddly, if I loved, still I never could bring myself to hate. Actions, words, use them as weapons but time will heal all the ache caused, remove all the anger from my tired, mauled bones. I feel, deeply, I do, but not quite love nor hate, not for anyone, anywhere, not ever and certainly not forever.

I won’t love you, but I’ll give you pieces of my soul as long as there is something left to give – and there will always be something left to give, something small maybe, a shard, a speck of dust on the doorsteps of the universe. I’ll share my world with you, maybe even ask for yours in return, but I never much liked receiving. Not anything. Not even at all. I’ll scrape my knees crawling to you, and still, that will not ever be love, not even close. Sometimes I feel such emotions were spared in my making. Faulty, silly little me, cannot even feel what is meant to be felt, yet so willing to give and to give and to give when nothing is left to give – nothing but my soul and its mangled pieces – nothing but my everything. So, I cannot hate you even when you are blind to what I offer, when you don’t realise it’s my entire existence you hold in your two-five-digit hands.

I could love you, I think, if you did not exist.
I could hate you for it even more.

Two people, only us, standing somewhere in the universe, with pieces of our soul hanging loose like guts spilled from gaping wounds. Painless.

Funnily enough, I still cannot hate you even as you stomp on my insides and blame me for all your flaws – and that’s alright, I’ll just blame you for mine.

Keep it. Keep my soul.
Who cares if it’s with you, or within my core? It remains and will remain here, within the universe. However far you may go, with a little hint of me in your core, however far you steal me from myself, there’s nowhere you can go, nowhere quite far enough where I won’t be able to tell apart your footprints from all those wandering souls.
Those miserable creatures who can love despite it all.

You’re funny, in a humourless way. You do believe in love, but not quite in loving me – isn’t that so sweet, the way you kept that little piece. You’ll keep it forever, I know, because we were once a whole, and now no other could possibly recreate what is gone.

So, keep it. Keep my soul.
In turn, I’ll keep your, too. Far, far away, so I may never have to look at it, never feel it, because if love was there once it perished and hate tried to grow roots in its absence but could not find soils soft enough – because there was no soil for you either, love, oh love.

How foolish of you to think we couldn’t ever be soulmates if there was no love. We are, in an antagonising way, two pieces of a whole meant to remain anything but mended, fused. We’ll linger within each other long after our bones return to ash. Haunting, the universe will feel it, too, forever.

And I am bitter, so bitter, that I don’t mind it, not a little, not at all, that I gave you a piece of my soul and called it love, and when we parted, I let you keep it, called it hate, just so it can haunt you when I am gone.

And I hope it haunted you. And haunts you still. Especially when you sleep.

Because our souls are one and the same.