On Having A Boyfriend With OCD by Meggie Royer

I reblogged a picture on tumblr a couple of days ago that was a picture of a poem in a book, called: On Having A Boyfriend With OCD. I've read it over and over again because it is just so beautiful but so sad at the same time, it breaks my heart. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with that disorder or to love someone who suffers from it. It must be so hard.

The poem is from a book called Survival Songs by Meggie Royer, an American poet. Her poems deal with complicated relationships (including what it feels liket to be replaced or used and abused) and different social issues.

The book is only 68 pages long and it costs about £6 on Amazon so I might get it to see if her other poems are as hauntingly beautiful and sad as this one.

On Having A Boyfriend With OCD:

He was always turning the lights on and off, 

opening and closing the door, counting as he went:

thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.

Eventually I had to tell him that if he kept opening the door, 

we'd have a whole bunch of house intruders

before the night was through. He responded by trying to kiss

me once, 

then ended up kissing me twenty-three times, then once more

for an even twenty-four. Then he had to redo two of them

because "our mouths hadn't been quite aligned."

Some nights I'd wake up with the moon soaking the bedsheets, 

listening to the sound of him repeating the word "fuck"

over and over: he'd stubbed his toe on the bathroom doorway

but couldn't stop swearing once he'd started.

I fell back asleep after staring at my pillow

until the floral patterns burned into my eyelids, 

dreamt the two of us went to an opera but instead of beautiful,

tremulous voices rising high into the air, 

two sopranos were singing "fuck"to the tune of La Traviata.

He apologises the next day, says the new medication 

made him feel like shit all the time so he took himself off it;

I responded that it probably made him feel that way

because it was working.

Two days later the ambulance comes and takes him away:

he'd accidentally cut one of his wrists with the steak knife

chopping carrots for stew

but couldn't have just one cut wrist;

he had to have two.