You Only Want Me In Pieces

Compartmentalized, pre-packaged, broken down into bite-sized versions of myself. Only the best parts, only the interesting parts, only the digestible, easier to handle parts. Only the “me” that has something you want, something you need, something that you can use.

You want me when it’s all “sext this” and “dildo that” and “anal every day.” You want me when your heart is aching and you need someone to coddle it. But when I’m not sex on a stick or I’m trying to keep my own stitches together…that’s not a piece you signed up to deal with.

You only want me in pieces, you only want a piece of me. You want whatever serves you best in the moment. You want whichever seems more palatable at the time. You want me broken up and expendable, easier to pick and choose, piece by piece instead of as an all-encompassing being.

See, you don’t want me. You just want bits and pieces. You want someone to heal your broken heart, but you’re uninterested in the lesions on my own. You want someone to hear about your life, but somehow mine comes across as white noise. You want me when I’m tantalizing, when I’m all baths and bubbles and legs, but when I say the words “suicidal ideation” or even just “I’m sad” (the horror!!) you’re nowhere to be found.

Because you just want pieces of me, and the whole me is something you could never manage. It’s not something you could ever swallow, is it?

Bit by bit, piece by piece, you only want me when I’m two-dimensional. Simple, undynamic, painfully beige and boring. You want me in pieces, but not the complicated ones. The complicated ones you’re more than happy to push to the side and let me scrape up on my own.

I guess you like your women easy in more ways than one. You like stark and bland and lacking in contrast. You want someone who gasses you up and doesn’t have needs of her own. You want someone to baby your aches and lick your wounds for you but be a self-sufficient entity the rest of the time.

Emotional labor only goes one way when it comes to you, and if something isn’t in pieces it would clearly be too much to lift.

You only want me in pieces, but I’m holding tight to the stitches, I’m not giving in anymore. I’m not breaking myself up to bring you back up and I’m not giving out bits anymore.

I deserve to be whole. I deserve to be layered. I deserve to be a full-fledged person. And I’m sorry that’s just too much for your little boy brain, but let’s face it—you’re not interested anyway.

Because you only want me in pieces. And as long as I keep letting you pick me apart, eventually there will be nothing left but the scraps of someone who used to be whole. And while I’m sincerely uninterested in being so unbelievably disposable to someone, I’m also not looking to put my own wreckage back together again.

Especially if it’s at the hands of someone as two dimensional, as boring, as basic, as incapable of being layered and interesting, as unable to see that every magical mosaic was once just bits and pieces, as you.