secondhand heartbreak

ix. hollow

i've known him for years.

i know that he is not the kind of person that people fall in love with — he is the kind of person that feels too violently and loves too recklessly. the kind of person that is filled to the brim with so many emotions that he is perpetually afraid they will overflow within him, that they'll drown him.

(memories consume him — this is what they mean by 'you can't escape the past'.)

i know that he is the last person to wear his heart on his sleeve, to make himself vulnerable to others —

(if someone has the ability to hurt him, it's because he has allowed them to wield that power over him. it's what he thinks he deserves.)

— so he instead wears a mask, one that has his facial expressions schooled into an emotionless, blank visage. he does not smile, he does not allow his eyes to betray the pain that lays underneath. he does not speak unnecessarily, in fear that he will reveal something about himself or that his voice will waver with grief, i don't know.

he is the kind of person who knows, more than anything else, how to break his own heart.

he's so good at it, he does it nearly every night. he's long past crying in the shower, past fighting until his knuckles bleed with the blood he should have shed all those years ago but didn't.

but he isn't past staring blankly at the coffee machine as it makes for him the substance that will keep him from sleeping. he's past a lot, but he doubts he will ever be past the nightmares.

he never stops breaking his own heart, but i don't think he's ever broken it as badly, as irreparably, as he did when he met her.

that is why i am so concerned when i see them together, smiling at each other like they share a secret only they know of and talking as if they've known each other for years instead of merely a handful of hours.

i can feel it already, the way she will inevitably make a place for herself in his life, then leave it hollow and empty and even lonelier than it was before ( — quite the feat).

she will leave, and he will hate himself for not being able to make her stay.