In The Laboratory

You told me you loved me -- your eyes held the truth of it when you spoke -- but my heart knew better. How did it know, what gave away your secret? And how could my mind understand, beleaguered as it was, when the skin of my neck vibrated with the soft touch of your breath whispering the very lie I wanted to believe?

Ah... love. Fickle and formative. Part of who I am has come to be by virtue of it, or else, by virtue of the discovery that it was not.

Odd. What seemed a discovery was merely recognition of something already known; an established fact making an unscheduled appearance in untried theory. You felt me reach for your words, and felt them ricochet back even as I fervently proclaimed the reciprocal. And you clutched me tighter to you, as if by mere determined embrace we could erase the truth we knew, in favor of the lie we preferred.

Endless experiments cluttered my room with photos, trinkets and memories of you -- like test tubes and dirty beakers strewn in a lab after class. Ah, the thrill of reaction and response... but the end result never changed.