cigarette lungs,
decaying with every heavy breath.
"i don't smoke to enjoy it. i smoke to die" you once said.
i remembered it as i watched the dirt cover your face and enter your lungs.
you met death and he accepted you with open arms,
cold hands,
and a hungry soul.
you didn't ask me much,
but you told me every time you wanted to jump in front of a car,
and you held my hand knowing that if you did it i'd be going too.
you never wanted me to die,
but you knew i began decaying like you,
slowly and painfully,
until my mind had burnt a painful hole in my chest.
as though someone had burnt out their cigarette using my confidence.
i shook with the same pain,
wanting to die but wanting to live a little more.

you pinned the dead butterflies and hung them in frames in your bedroom.
you told me you wished you could look beautiful when you died.
you knew that the grave you would end up in would be full of maggots and forgetfulness.
no one would remember the makeup you laboriously put on every day to look alive.
"no one will remember us" you told me.
you held my hand and told me to jump but my hand slipped.
i wanted to die,
but i wanted to live.
i was terrified of dying and you knew it.
you looked back with pain.
the rocks welcomed your pale body and i was left on the mountain that hovered above your unfriendly graveyard.

the morning of your funeral i remembered black.
i remembered black was your favorite color and you would be looking forward to swimming in a large space of black nothingness.
you told me you hoped you'd see stars and watch them burn while you floated around in nothing.

i didn't know what to say.
but the night sky makes me think of you and i like to think that you're sitting on some star watching it die the same way i watched you die.

Shes been waking me up in the middle of the night lately.
She pulls my hair in the early hours of the morning, beats the sleep out of me, like an angry sibling, all elbows and knees, a halo of messy hair, all because she needs to thread her fingers into mine, and tell me the stars are calling her home, calling her skyward.

And I laugh at her.

Because she doesn't understand the science of astrology or how the atoms that make up her being, are that of stars, and all she has to do is close her eyes to be home.

She hates when I laugh at her.

She waits restlessly, with hands bent tight around pens with black and blue ink, she begs me to give the paper bruises.
But I tell her I'm too busy.
Push her away, out of me, and back into herself.

She hates being alone.

She smiles at me, and brings me indigo flower beds and lilacs to rest my head on.
Shes been bending over backwards, writing our initials in the sand for so long now, fingers tripping over one another in the beaches of sand,
sand once held in hour glasses,
measuring out how many seconds and hours, days and weeks we have left with one another.

She tells me I am wasting this youth that I have, on dollar bills and proper sleeping habits.

She says artists don't need sleep.

She pulls me, sideways out of myself and tells me that she's leaving.

She wears red lipstick and climbs into the back of a big yellow cab, and writes a song about it. Sings it to me, when she slams the door.

She says I didn't appreciate her.

She just doesn't understand that the dust in my skeleton is shuddering, quaking, breathing and breaking.
Begging to be stirred up, swallowed down, and to devour something new.
She doesn't understand that I am in love with her, and the thousands of intricate patterns her fingertips could trace on blank canvases.

She has no idea that I will be irrevocably lost without her, with no map to guide me, or guide to find me.

She doesn't know that without her, I am nothing.

She doesn't know that I need her.