I write about you and fold the page in half. Two more folds for a body I imagine is mine, your hands mine, bending me, creasing me into something I’m not, something I’m never meant to achieve. But your touch isn’t skilled and you never were good at following directions, so the plane you make of my words, of my blood-turned-ink, isn’t structurally sound.
You chuck it across the room, careless in your enthusiasm, and these fragile concepts of worthiness and value and love are passengers on this one way trip. There’s no warning, but every grim expectation as the plane rapidly descends. As it falls, violently for its innocuous form, the same way I did for you, the welling emotion I was too terrified to name loses its nebulous form. It is a scream now. Something primal and anguished and I expect the plane to burst into flames upon impact for all the noise.
But it doesn’t. It’s just paper, after all. There’s no passengers, no jet fuel, no one to pray is alive as it crashes on a pet-stained floor. There’s nothing to mourn when the nose crumples or the paper tears; no reason to cry when my words are lost beneath the dismissal of a failed endeavor. It’s ink, not blood, and I’ve always excelled in writing fiction.
So when you ball the plane with hands that had been so gentle taking mine, there’s nothing lost. Into the trash it goes, a gaping maw where all my failed attempts at a cohesive narrative, a flourishing romance, a happy ending lay heaped like so many abandoned corpses. This attempt at flight was just that–an attempt. An experiment. Something that flew, and crashed, in the face of reason.
Like the ones I’d listed for you.