10 fingers touching my skin and it only took 9 days to fall in love. we called every night at 8 o'clock, your voice drifting softly like silk through the telephone. i thought about you 7 days per week, about the 6 kisses you gave me, each like a new level of a game: hand, cheek, forehead, nose, lip, neck; each like its own act in a play. the taste of saccharine on yellow mornings. the radio played in your car, 5 songs on repeat as we kissed in the backseat. 4 nights spent together at our clandestine location, always 3 words on my mind but never dared to utter. just 2 lips kissing under the pale moonlight and 1 boy of my dreams.

but
10 times you stood me up, and i left you 9 voicemails saying that i loved you since you never picked up the telephone. i always forgave you even though you never apologized. you were only 8 blocks away, yet i forgave you again and again. perhaps because i thought that if i forgave you enough, you would come back to me. i wrote you 7 pages of poems but then tore up or burned in an inferno like that of my smoldering rage, not towards you but towards myself. i blamed myself for your lack passion and tenderness. 6 crocodile tears splashed onto my pillow like the gems you gifted me that i had to return, as i listened to the 5 songs that reminded me too much of you. the taste of fermented bitterness in ebony blackness. 4 other women i didn't know about. how foolish of me. how foolish of them. 3 words you could never say, 2 eyes crying in dark solitude, prisoners to my swelling heart, and 1 heartbreak of my dreams.