my science teachers tried to explain a lot to me in the years i've been in school. they tried to explain why people can't fly in anything other than man-made machines of welded metal and tangled wires. they tried to explain why love is a chemical imbalance.

psychology taught me that chemical imbalances in the brain are dangerous, at best. schizophrenia. multiple personality disorder. psychosis. narcolepsy. even sleep-walking. psychology taught me that everything i do, every winter, is so wrong. every winter, a creeping pain grabs hold on every reality i establish, after careful consideration, and rips it right out from under me. i'm left with hurt. never pain. the differences between hurt and pain, i learned, are staggering.

science taught me that pain is instantaneous. hurt is residual. hurt is time.

i don't know why i lied and said i love you. i don't know why i wasted precious moonbeams on your face and entertaining all the things psychology class taught me were wrong.

right and wrong. good and bad. love and hate. decisions and fear. back-seats and cold hands. science and psychology. pain and hurt. hurt and time.

science is always trying to confuse people about who they really are. five paragraph essays on how your weight on earth and how your weight on the moon are different. three hundred and thirteen-page scientific journals, yellowed pages and faded ink hiding behind leather-bound books, trying so hard to change and warp any grasp on reality you _think you have.

i couldn't honestly tell you why i kissed you. i couldn't tell you how i bared through the sounds of a dying heart in a withering chest, barely covered by enough skin to hide the monster beating on your rib cage. i don't know how i slept then. i don't know how i sleep now.

psychology taught me many things, but you expected so much more out of me. diagnosis's shouldn't ever be made by anyone that looks as lost as i was. psychology taught me that i couldn't fix myself, and i certainly thought i was invincible enough to try and fix something much worse.

science taught me, simply put, humans are so fragile. soft, pink muscles lay under just a few layers of stretchy skin. under the muscles lay hundreds of miles of reconstructing cells, blood vessels running rampant through sewing veins. white, soft bones form and break and stain. nothing is ever pure.

science explains pain in two equations. thirteen words. five sentences. three-and-a-half paragraphs. five leather-bound novels trying to lure youth into the world of chemicals - youths that don't understand their own imbalances. science told me how pain is caused, where it comes from, and how it varies from being to being. science took the wonder out of slow-forming bruises, the ones resembling your fingertips and your palms, they took the wonder out of pain. so i am left with electric currents and shocks where you touch me as blood seeps through the layers of skin, trying to tell me to run while i can.

i never tried to love you, i tried to love the monster inside of you. such similarities between disorders. so much promise behind blue eyes, such little compassion behind your lesser lenses. nightbeasts raging and fighting a fifteen-year-old boy stuck in a 20-year-old body, trying to find himself in the monsters he can't handle and the heroin he injects every night. always hopeful that he won't face another day.

i mistook a monster for an unwilling host to a slow, resentful apparition.

pain is instant. so is death.

science taught me that hurt is my own doing, but i digress.

it's the memories you left me.