I was always the atheist who capitalized the G.

The girl in the back of the choir wondering why we never sang about Her.

Fretting over Anne Frank's place in a Catholic heaven,

I left God like a lost childhood friend.

We had one too many arguments.

Differences, in opinion.

Today

A girl with a whopping total of 1 year more

Life Experience than I

Scoffed

As my shaking voice said

“Sometimes you can't fix things with your parent.”

“Sometimes there is no relationship to improve there.”

“Sometimes those things can't be fixed.”

I bow my head as she tells me all it takes is one phone call a day

Playing back phone calls in my head

-HelloWhoIsIt?

Please stop

Please

This isn't fair to me

Please leave me be-

This girl is me; before the fear.

Before the fall,

Before the let down.

No begging passes her lips

She has known no threat

Contributes to my theory that smiling faces

cannot bruise.

You are beautiful.

You have two strange knees

and a loud mouth

and short hair

and too much time on your hands.

You have told me all of these things

Now I tell them to myself.

I love you.

You'll make one hell of a poem.

One hell of a story.

You are mine.

You have told me all of these things.

Now I tell them to myself.

Even in my home, I no longer have a roof over my head. No more can I lay in bed listening to rain hitting the roof, pressing my ear against the cold, foggy window to hear the thunder.

Instead, above me, there are people.
People I have not met, who do not know me.
People who will never care to know my worries or fears or deepest desires.
They do not care that their footsteps douse out my raindrops.

They do not care about me.

I lie here drowning, sinking, into the storm, but never hear its din.

I've made you into pretty words.

Scrap metal.

Crumpled pages.

Ink Spilled.

You made me brilliant.

Permanent.

I suppose I made you permanent, too, but you never saw it that way.

Never looked at your own etchings and called them beautiful the way I did for you.

Your permanence was always in scars on my skin.

Graphite Queen Anne's Lace drawn in my sketchbooks.

My permanence was always poetry with you.

Lovely musings for hours about an afternoon alone.

You made the sunsets sound even nicer after they were gone.

You can't put poetry on a chain,

Shackled.

I ran too far from you to ever be held down.

But here you are

Scrap Metal

Hanging from my neck.

Maybe we thought we were ironic.

Poor kids

throwing money on train tracks

to watch it flatten,

lose all value.

Sick kids

driving too fast and too far.

Tired kids

staying out too late.

Kids.

Talking through the hard parts.

The bad bits.

The most painful days.

We lived them all.

We were kids.