Remorse in the way your older brothers taught you right from wrong when they told you to stay away from their friends and them.
Laughter in the way the moon told me jokes while she was sleeping beside you,
guilt in the way that I taught you how to drown while your were trying to teach me how to swim,
death in the way you lose people who are still alive.

Absence, the way my father was absent from my life the way a child with cancer would be absent from school.
Horror, the way she probably screams and writhes with your body, and here I am screaming and writhing with a blade again.
Empty, the way my body was on August 25, 2014.
Full, the way the bottles never were.
Dread, the last breath of desire.
Happy, the way I was on the day it rained and your mother forgot my name.
Broken, like the skull of the animal I ran over the other night.

Love, love me like I love inflicting new wounds upon myself,
tolerate the way her breath doesn't make you moan when it moves down your neck,
my breath was like a ghost.

Sadness like that first day of February.
Time change like a car wreck you can't look away from, we call it depression here.

Family.
The way blood means nothing and smiles from strangers mean everything.

Maybe Max was just a figment of imagination that the Wild Things used to display themselves into something greater than themselves, a king, a different species than them. Maybe we are all Wild Things, and maybe each day a new one of us is king. We are all ******* crazy but have a desire for life in different ways than anyone else aside from us that I know. Maybe we all just want to be loved, all in different ways and different beliefs but also the same. Maybe the combination of all of our personalities and features, all of our art and all of our emotion makes a king. Maybe Max was the combination of all of the Wild Things as a human. I think that we are a unit, we have the strangest form of unity. It is not a conventional unity, it's a slight dependence, with a mixture of independence. We crave so much from the world and lose touch of ourselves far too often. The pores in our skin have been soaking up the sorrows of the world and those around us and I'm just waiting for the day that all of our pores turn into holes and the mass of light within us explodes through.

I have been listening to Flatsound so much that I think Mitch Welling may have possessed my chest and taught me all of the wrong ways to say I love you.

First phase:
Car windows, cold ones, winter. You were three. To this day from time to time you'll put your fingertips against the glass because it reminds you of simple things from the past. You always thought the world looked looked like it was unhappy from back seats, like it was reflecting your own complacency.

Phase two:
Narcolepsy. You can't stay awake anymore because when you're awake it's like you're dreaming and surrounded by reclusiveness and weeping and when you're asleep it's like you're alive and you're hearts still beating.

Phase three:
Car windows, nonexistent, summer.
You were five, nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen.
Songs. Nostalgia. Windows. Sun. Sticky air, air that smothers you. Smiles with people you love. Songs. Those **** songs.

Phase four:
Punching walls, kicking objects, throwing breakable things, slamming doors. Screaming so loud you make yourself cry.
I learned from the best.

Final phase:
Leaving.

They treat her skin like it's ******* and her tongue like it's ecstasy and her fingers like they're needles shooting up their veins with misguided entropy, but it's really just her poisonous lies she hides behind and things they'll never see buried inside that they become addicted to.
They swear they can quit, they swear they'll get clean, they know girls like that are bad, they're not someone your mother would want you to see. All she leaves them with are some track marks and a broken heart.

The sunlight looked like moonlight at 2 in the afternoon and the way my skin looked when the light hit it through the blinds made me lose sense of reality and track of time. The moonlight and my pale skin are the exact same shade and it's not just a coincidence she has the same name. Eventually the night actually came but the moon shed no light, I was surrounded by darkness and memories that fly around my head screaming their goodbyes. Ghosts that dance on the walls and replay in front of me, I was entrapped by the past and put off by the future and everything is a long line of suture.

The whole time I was haunted, I was begging for something enchanting. Grasping for something to hold on to but all of the handles in this lifetime are already being held onto or they're broken. I let it go in the dark like this was all a false start. I could see the track marks she left on your arms, they reminded me of the stars.

There is a defining thing for me at this point, and that's that I have learned to live for art. I have learned that people are too faulty and fickle. So many fall into themselves and crumble like a poorly made sculpture, and I know that I can always try to rebuild them, but trust me when I say I've tried so many different times that by now I know they'll be different each time.

I stopped telling people my problems and my stories and I encased what "dead silence" is to the point where the silence that I radiate scares some people. The way I'm bad at crying and laughing and feeling makes some people run the opposite direction. If only you people could understand that the words bleed out onto paper as metaphors and the feelings are different shades of paint that you'll never be able to pinpoint as the right emotion. It's just that drawing paper and canvases and notebook paper and landscapes listen a lot better than so many of those **** things with their ears, and my hands are much better at telling things than my mouth is. The sounds of non-existent chords I play and the ambiguity behind the hums are not something I can explain to you, they're just a way I can talk without speaking.

I am bad at committing to anything except myself, dying, and these songs.

The way they talk, they let me know that it's becoming too hard to love someone who doesn't talk as much as they should, it's hard to love a puzzle when there's so many missing ******* pieces and no picture to look off of.
If only they understood.

As an infant there was always more tears than laughter and despondent empty eyes from people who were supposed to look at me with eyes full of future and love. The first thing babies automatically know how to do regularly is not smile or laugh, but cry.  
I'm not sure if we all cried for our sins in our past lives or for the ambiguity of the life we were entering.

There were empty rooms in that house, too many for me to count. It always smelled like coffee in the mornings and we made shadow puppets on the walls, he taught me how to make butterflies with my hands before I knew how to love.

Maybe the shadows were made out of needles instead of hands.

Our first best friends are rarely the ones we see beside us on our graduation day or cheering us on at the altar. The ones who kissed our skinned knees with such innocence when our parents weren't around during our first year of school are not the ones that kiss our bruised hearts and broken minds when we lose our stability later in life when nobody is around.

I remember your eyes.

It wasn't the ocean, it was a knock off. It was the most beautiful piece of something cheap compared to a million dollars of crystalized beauty, maybe you saw that thing you love(d) so dearly within it and that's why we went there so much, but it will always be framed inside of my mind. You left the car when I looked at the trailer trash sea from the back seat like it was the most golden beach. The sunset reflected the pulse from the bodies that would be close to mine later in life. I've never felt a sunset like I did on that day. The highway was a different shade of gray on the ride home. I haven't seen that color since.

The first insults feel like bullet holes and sound like nails on a chalk board. You learn with age that you are only what you see yourself as, you are not these combinations of letters and sounds and syllables used to make yourself turn against yourself.

I remember the light on the front porch and the way the air felt. I remember the way I barely saw your face and the way your voice cracked. I remember I kept my body in the warmth and my head outside in the cold where your entire body was, and maybe that's why my head hasn't been right ever since. I remember feeling something sad and not understand why and realizing almost every day since then that goodbye's can be forever and not just see you later's.

We will throw our caps in the air, and there will be a barrier with many cracks in it between me and what once was. There will be an open road with forevers laced like a dotted line straight down the middle in front of me and I will scream goodbye to the sound of my favorite songs,
and I'm sorry, but I don't know how long I'll be gone.