how do i know if what i feel is physical or emotional?

Is this emptiness i feel due to the lack of the food my body craves or to the absence my heart feels?

Which kind of hunger is this?

my heart is hollow. where the aorta and ventricles and valves are supposed to be, there is only negative space now. where you had settled in so comfortably, with your bookshelves and arm chairs, is only an empty room now. abandoned. cold. alone.

i see the look in your eyes and i know that the part of you that loved me has died.

i think about how my body no longer fits into yours comfortably. it sticks out in odd angles and ends, my self-consciousness pushing my body away from you. I think about the words - oh the ugly words, that torture me in your voice, each line like a hit right through the gut, winding me, leaving me gasping for air and clutching my chest. How is it that an intangible emotion, causes such physical pain?

I can no longer look at photos of myself without hearing that voice in my head. Will i never be enough for you?

I run, putting one foot before the other to keep from falling. but i stumble still, i think about your eyes devoid of warmth, your hands that no longer reach for mine, and i stumble, on imaginary rocks and holes in the ground i just wish could swallow me up.

you are no longer home to me, the safe haven, the sanctuary - it's all gone. when i am in your arms i think - why does this body feel so foreign to me, why does it feel like a cold hard wall i cannot surmount?
in the nights you turn your back on me, i wonder how can the world of distance the separates us fit into the twin size bed we lie on?

i think to the time i cried, looking to you for comfort, for tenderness, hoping that the pain you see in my eyes will free you from the force that paralyses you, that you may cross the distance between us to hold me in your arms. instead, you place your hand on my knee. it is then that i know that i have lost you.

my heart has started to shrink, hoping that if i demolish the place you inhibited, i will forget that you once trespassed these lands. but stones and concrete do not vanish into nothing, they resist. I find myself searching for you amidst the crowd, hoping that i will find your face - and the calm that i have thousand times before found there. I wait for you to fall in step beside me, but you never did.

Where are you?
where are you?
Where are you?

but you weren't there,
for me.