I thought I seen you standing there, you, the real you this time. Standing behind the bar, giving that same what the **** look you always had. It was real this time. Not an image of your ghost, it couldn’t be, it was two o’clock. Two in the afternoon, you couldn’t haunt me in the day light. I wiped my eyes that filled with tears, and you weren’t there.

This was all for you, a long time ago.
Forever ago, when our demons sung to one another from miles away. Singing songs about each other that felt both like a love song but covered in heart break. It was all for you, a long time ago. Forever ago, until my demons stopped singing with yours, and learned to let go.

She cried out, while her demons hummed a song of sorrow
“Will you sing me a song, my love?”
“Will you write me a song, a song about our love? Our demons can hum a tune to sing too.”
But there was no love, there was no harmony between us, nor rhythm, we made white noise, a lot of ******* nonsense white noise.

This was all for you, a long time ago.
Forever ago, when our demons sung to one another from miles away. Singing songs about each other that felt both like a love song but covered in heart break. It was all for you, a long time ago. Forever ago, until my demons stopped singing with yours, and learned to let go.

I still hear echoes of your demons howling to me, trying to sing but very out of tune. Singing songs that could be a love song but to me sounds like words that howl goodbye.

This was all for you, a long time ago,
But, not anymore
My demons sing her to sleep, night after night,
And they sound so beautiful.
This is all for her, for a long time from now.

You say all lives matter yet the only lives you are protecting are those cis gendered white, males and females. Even then, our women fought for the freedom they still don’t equally have. You say all love is equal but throw a coffee at someone holding hands with their same *** partner. You say all lives matter but you accuse an innocent man of colour for giving fraudulent money for the sake of his skin tone.
All lives can’t matter until our friends, family, and community can safely walk into a store to purchase something, and walk out without being attacked to the point of death.
This is the same system that let a man out after six short months for good behaviour for multiple ****** assault charges. The system is broken, and in order to protect those we love. We must stand.
We must scream.
We must riot.
We must vote.

She looked right at me, with this look, a look that screamed she was aching for love,






                                 one that wouldn’t destroy her.

You,
Something about you.
You,
smiled, and I swore, sunflowers grew.
You,
we’re the sun that kept my skin glowing in June.
You,
the slight breeze that rustles through the grass, my hair, just enough to let me know you aren’t far.
You,
you danced around me the way a bee danced around a flower that needed to be pollinated.
You,
So gentle, so calm, kissed me slowly but at the same time, all at once.
You,
we’re the waves that crashed into the shoreline.
You,
you felt like dancing in the moonlight in warm August air.
You,
you were the summer love I dreamed about.
You,
it’ll always be you.
You,
we’re always there, I just had to open my eyes to see you were the sun that brightened my summer.

I was sleeping with Love when Death came to visit me last night, caught me laying with her. He swore, saying every word imaginable because why was Love with me? Not with him? Loves face lit up with terror, was he going to take me, or was he going to take Love away? Little did she know I was already dancing with Death, flirting my way through life with both of them at my side. You can’t believe in love without death, and believe in death without love - the two collide together.

I had a dream, maybe it was another nightmare, they all look the same lately.

There I was sitting at the kitchen table staring at a piece of mail, and I swear I stared in disbelief for what felt like an eternity. Your name written on something new, something more than a memory that we simply stored away. Your name, was it your name? or was it another name that just happened to be the same but no other resemblance to you? Your name before me on a piece of paper, a document, and it was open. So I opened it, it was addressed to you if it was really your name, and it was a credit card bill. A list of charges of things I could see you buying. She told me to put it down, it’s just junk, an old statement they just finally sent, I’ll call tomorrow and make sure all her old cards are cancelled and nobody got ahold of them, she said.

I couldn’t listen to her, that didn’t make sense. It’s been almost twelve ******* years, the cards would be expired and unless someone with the same name had their mail sent here, than how could this make sense? It didn’t, but she called and they said it was active, and happened to be recently renewed. Just what I had this terrible feeling for in my stomach, it was you. It made no sense, a terrible ****** up mistake that you could explain 100 times, I’d never understand and I’d never even care to try. You were still here, not dead, not gone, there you were somewhere letting us know you could be found. You never really left that day, you just had some ****** up story I could forgive for thinking you were dead for twelve years. I thought of the things I’d say the moment I finally got to see you again, I got to feel the warmth of my mom again, and how what I had become was so cold and numb, you’d fix that all. There I was, getting ready to find you when the phone rang, it was the credit card company, and I guess things are stored according to last name, and there was someone with the exact same name as you and a few missed spelled addresses, your mailbox didn’t exist but the mail ended up at Nan’s kitchen table. The beeping was driving me crazy but something in me gasped for air while I opened my eyes to the sound of my alarm reminding me to wake up for work. Reminding me to wake the **** up. Finding you again? It was all a dream. That’s not really a dream is it. It’s more of a ******* nightmare. It’s actually the trauma from losing you but needing you all at the same time trying to let me know, you’re there in my dreams to help me but in my nightmares to remind me you aren’t reachable. They just became one over the years. It’s the forgiveness in my heart to forgive anything as long as it means to have you back.

My fingers trembled and clenched around a tiny blue box,
a tiny blue box of matches
A small box, containing small wooden sticks
That’s what was going to end it all
I had a match in my hand
You raised your voice
Actually I’d call it a scream
Screaming my name
Begging me to burn it down
And you told me to make sure I lit it all on fire as that was the only way to end everything we knew
Bring it all down
Bring everything we built down to nothing but ashes
You screamed
My hands trembled
Holding tightly onto the little blue box
I had a match in my hand
You raised your voice
And I closed my eyes but I never opened them, and I never heard you scream my name again
I think I let it go
I no longer had a match in my hand
And our love was left burn to ash

I’ve been hearing feelings
Knocking at my door
Recklessly I let them in
I let them in
This is not the best place to find love
In the ghosts of a girl I once knew
They keep me up all night,
Singing a tune about you
It went something like

She’s a girl that’s both the sun and the moon
She’ll never let you see the darkness without the light coming soon
Who would have thought I could love my best friend?
But she drove recklessly into my heart, same way she drives her car, one hand on the wheel, the other on her knee - forgetting to watch her speed
Her blue eyes, shine like the moon
Her heart warm like the sun
Holding tight onto something I didn’t know I would lose so soon

When I’m with you, I have a friend
And suddenly the haunting comes to an end
No longer stuck indoors
Between these haunted walls
You must think I’m drunk when I mumble the words you’re so beautiful
But you don’t let anything scare you the way I do

When you lay that beautiful head of yours down at night
Do your thoughts try to drown you and does your chest get tight?
One minute you’re here, and the next you’re fading. The things I’d do to stop all your aching.
Something doesn’t feel right, maybe it’s because I keep waiting
Waiting for these feelings to bring you back
I wish I could bring you back here, for one more night,
maybe these nightmares of losing someone like you would stop.

This is not the best place to find love
In the ghosts of a girl I once knew
They keep me up all night,
Singing a tune about you
It went something like

She’s a girl that’s both the sun and the moon
She’ll never let you see the darkness without the light coming soon
Who would have thought I could love my best friend?
It was the way she made me laugh through the depression
Not letting me feel alone
She made my thoughts go silent when she was around

When I’m with you, I have a friend
And suddenly the haunting comes to an end
No longer stuck indoors
Between these haunted walls
You must think I’m drunk when I mumble the words you’re so beautiful
But you don’t let anything scare you the way I do

I feel battered
Sleeping till noon
I thought it was the ***** but I’ve been missing you
And that haunts me every night
Will you hold me tight
Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight
I keep trying to close my eyes but the ghosts over shadow me, and life after you keeps my thoughts racing and my chest tight

You crashed your car into my heart
But I was drunk and I let the devil in
I let her ******* win
I recklessly let her win
When I let those feelings in
I should have never opened the door

This is not the best place to find love
In the ghosts of a girl I once knew
They keep me up all night,
Singing a tune about you
It went something like

She’s a girl that’s both the sun and the moon
She’ll never let you see the darkness without the light coming soon
Who would have thought I could love my best friend?

When I’m with you, I have a friend
And suddenly the haunting comes to an end
No longer stuck indoors
Between these haunted walls
You must think I’m drunk when I mumble the words you’re so beautiful
But you don’t let anything scare you the way I do

Now everything reminds me of you
ghosts
Blue eyes
The moon
Who could have thought I could love my best friend?
Now I’m drunk, sleeping till noon, devil by my side, wishing it was you.
Come back, take my hand, and I’ll put the bottle down
I’m knocking
Please let me in

Break down
In the backseat of a cab
Four of us
Me in the middle
You all are focused on me
In the middle
The middle of all this mess
The mess I’ve created
With a love that doesn’t exist
With a failed relationship at my side
With depression supporting me close by
With trauma rooting me into the middle
The middle of the mess,
I became the point of attraction.
In the backseat of our cab, I was a mess
You held my hand, barely
but you sorta not really tried.
You’re counting the stop signs
Holy **** we are still in the ******* cab
Still a mess
Still in the middle
Still a ******* mess in the backseat of a cab
And I’m trying to tell you I’m done
This is goodbye
To your mess
To our mess
To the mess we’ve created while
Destroying one another
Pushing one another
Not loving one another
This is our mess in the backseat of the cab

What do I do?
I’m lost without you
All it takes is thinking about your face
I shut the door
Got on my knees
And begged please
Bring her back to me
I don’t know how to pray
Never really believed in God
Now I’m on my knees expecting him to answer me
Asking him, oh God, where is she?
I’m lost without you
All it takes is thinking about her name
Living my life with a broken heart
Her allure was the smell of her perfume
And it haunts me in my sleep
Falling apart
I don’t know what to do
Looking for you to save me
God, please answer tonight
I need her back in my life
I’m lost without you
All it takes is waking up in the morning
And seeing your side of the bed still made
I’m lost without you
All it takes
All it takes
All it ******* takes is me waking up every morning and this gaping hole in my chest widens
All it takes
How long until this hole completely breaks me? Engulfs the person who you one time loved
All it takes I tell him is bringing her home to me
On my knees talking to a man I can’t even see
And how do I know he’ll even hear me with all the sins I’ve committed
Loving you was my favourite and I hope he hears it
Begging, father, please, bring her home to me

You were just like winter, you were the coldest, holding you too long made me numb, it hurt and it even had the power to make me lose parts of myself. Loving you was like getting frostbite, you left permanent scars of the hurt you caused. Your heart was pure ******* ice and nothing could thaw that cold dead heart of yours. You had me trapped, caught under a blanket of snow, had me scared that the snow from you was going to keep falling, piling up on top of me. You didn’t hear me screaming, you didn’t come looking for me, you were so self centred that you didn’t even notice everything you put on me. Now I’m suffering with Chionophobia thanks to you. With you, I never knew when one of your storms was going to blow through, stopping our days plans, making things dangerous and slippery around you. You were so unpredictable. Winter and you, both the reason for the change in my moods, the reason I avoided things, laying in bed - day after day. You lived your life in patterns, only staying in one place for a few months before you had to leave. I bet you didn’t know, that I ******* hated winter, I still do, thanks to you.

Every morning I watch the sunset from my bedroom window, I’m not a morning person but since you left, I don’t sleep much. You snuck out, and I watched your car drive away under the rise of the sun. You left me roses to show that you cared, and leaving hurt you too. Every morning I watch the sunset from my bedroom window, hoping your car will pull back into the drive way.

I built us a home and I hoped one day you’d walk through the front door again. Kick off your shoes and tell me you’ve come back to stay.

I built us a home and I waited for you to come back home to me.

You never did. Both myself and the house I built for you grew old, waiting for you to come back home.

Every morning I wake up, I hope the moment I open my eyes, I hear you getting ready in the bathroom, I hope I hear your footsteps coming to wake me up for school. I hope I’m 10 years old and everything is okay, but every morning I wake up, I feel pain in the pit of my stomach, I don’t hear your footsteps and nothing is the same.

Our bed was on fire, and you just stood there. I swear I seen the devil in your grin, it wasn’t you but the you I knew wasn’t real - so maybe you were the devil beneath your clothes. I knew you lit the matress on fire, your dad told you to burn your old mattress and buy a new one every few years. That explained why you ripped our mattress off the bed we shared, knocking things over and creating chaos. You were chaos, sometimes old memories of you slip up, and I smile but then I remember you lit our ******* bed on fire.
A bed may have a different meaning for you than me.
You used me like you used that exact mattress to sleep around on. Now look at you, burning your past, trying to hide the damage we both knew was done.
You lit our ******* bed on fire.
It was a ******* Tuesday in January.

She was the guardrail;
that stopped me every time I pressed on the gas a bit too hard. She stopped me from going over the edge every time I went too fast around the sharp corners.
She held my hand while they picked out all the bone chips and cut off my blood stained clothes, it could have been worse but she stopped me from going off the edge of the cliff with her guardrail heart.

You are the most manipulative creature with your alligator tears. Claiming to feel bad for eating your prey but you never stop, you do it over and over again, hoping the fake display of emotion will mask the joy you really get from killing others for your own survival. You only hunt the weak at heart.

Thoughts raced, anxiety flowed through my veins, I talked myself into taking a deep breath.
Slowly I inhaled, and slowly I exhaled.
If I could focus on my breathing, maybe for one minute I could stop focusing on how much I love you.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Focus on the breaths I’m taking instead of focusing on how loving you can’t happen.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I wish I could talk myself out of loving you the way I talk myself into focusing on my breathing instead of you.

It’s time love, time for you to forget me.
I know you don’t understand but it’s hard to explain. It’s hard to feel love for someone like you. Our past makes this hard to even ever begin again, and I’d have to tell you which means letting you in.
It’s time love, time for you to forget me.
I know you don’t want to because along the way, we became best friends. Somehow along the way, my heart started aching for your smile.
I hear you telling me to get out of my own head, and let love in but I can’t tell you that it’s your love I crave incase it’s the reason you push me away.
It’s time love, time for you to forget me.
I know you don’t want to forget me and you’ll say something sweet and I’ll drop to my knees.
I’ll pray I could be half the person you need.
I won’t be, and I can’t tell you how much I wish it was me, so I sit and listen to you tell me all about how he makes you feel.
But it’s time love, time for you to forget me.

I killed myself,
I killed myself more than once but I know that makes you sad. The very thought of me killing the person I’ve become to start over new. I killed my mind, simply trying to stay alive. I killed myself by loving you. I killed myself without even trying. I killed my self best by living everyday so unhappy. I don’t know the person that lives here now because I killed myself.

Kerosene

Kerosene and me,
What a love story.
If we can even call it love, some would call us a disaster, an explosion of broken pieces.
Together; we fuelled the fire, lacked the desire to put it out.
Kerosene was her name, I swear because that’s all that flowed through her veins. No one expected her to cut her veins wide open and bleed dry onto my flame kissed skin. I guess that’s what happens when you let my love kerosene in. Same toxic love story they tell you to stay away from but I didn’t know it then. Soaked in her combustible love, hoping she’d keep me safe but the story goes, watch your back for the knife they will stab you with. She had no knife, but she struck a match, struck it down the spine of my back. As the flame grew, she drew away from me, avoiding the heat, the danger, the toxins, all the things she created in me. She dropped the match, and watched my kerosene drenched heart become engulfed in flames so strong, everything around me crumbled into ashes. Insanity wouldn’t describe this moment, this love destroyed every fibre in my body, turning this heart into nothing but ash.
My sweet kerosene,
can’t you see what you do to me?
My love, kerosene,
smiled as she walked away from me, and the fire she started.

I use to feel sorry about losing it all, I felt sorry for the hurt we were feeling. I felt sorry for taking a love away from you that I thought you deserved. I don’t feel sorry anymore, I’m glad we lost it all. Why should I feel sorry about giving you everything and walking away when you gave me nothing? I’m not sorry for realizing what I deserve, and I’m not sorry for the hurt I was feeling. I was angry, I was sad, and I was disappointed for settling for a love that wasn’t even love. It was *******. It was a sad excuse for love, and I knew I wanted a love that was real, not like the movies but a love that made me feel, made me a better person. Your love knocked me down, made me someone I wasn’t, your love made me numb when all I wanted to do was feel. I’m not sorry we lost it all, but I was for a brief second until I realized who I was, and the love I was capable of giving, you helped me realize I deserved better, more love, more friendship and deserved to feel instead of being numb to the world around me. I use to be sorry but now I’m thankful we lost it.

Don’t know how, don’t know when, she became the poet of my heart, and I was lost again. All the things I forgot I could feel, she wrote into my story again. Everything a poet describes was standing right in front of me.

I hope you remember the sound of my laugh, I hope you remember the way my love felt, and the way my eyes made you feel when I looked at you. I hope you remember it most when I’m loving someone that’s finally not you. I hope you remember all the things you needed, and that I was every single one of them, but to her, I am more than that.

The way you weigh my heart down,
that’s deepest scar I carry.

Finally found internal peace but I never thought it would be you who put my mind at ease.
My demons inside me use to beg for this feeling, and all it took was your voice to sing them to sleep.
My mind never felt so clear, so free.
If this is how it feels to be around you, I don’t think I’ll be able to survive without your high.
I understand the concept of addiction, if I can’t quit, then I’ll never be the same again,
If you feel this good, I may become an addict, and I have everything to lose.
Keep singing my demons to sleep, my love.
It’s the only way to keep me alive, without your voice they chase a high that’s known to ****.

Terrified that we just lost you. I was troubled what my next move was going to be without you. How could I make my next move without you there to guide me? Tragedy was nothing I really had experienced before, something I somehow could avoid before.

And then it happened, I lost you, my best friend. Heartsick, grief-stricken, sorry, out of sorts. Call it whatever you want because nothing else could matter once it all fell, crashed to the ground once we found out you were no longer there. A ******* tragedy I could never come back from.

Now I’m spending day after day looking for you in every part of my day. Every gust of wind, wondering if you’re *******. Every sunny day, wondering if you’re smiling. Every rainy day, wondering if you are hurting. I wonder if you are the butterflies, the rainbows, the smiles in strangers. The flurry of snow on Christmas. I look for you in everyone, everything, all around me.

I think you’re still here, not far at all, close to me, close to my heart, helping me in some other way.

I’ve been mad at the world since she last left.
Still trying to figure out how to process my moms death. Screaming for help but the anger sits inside, and we all try to fight it, hide it a little longer, hoping we won’t break.
Trying to process how she left, knowing she cleaned the house, wrote her goodbyes and left them to be found. She had a story, an escape to keep everyone from worrying.
Laid down, deep breath and thought “this is it”
And I’ve been so mad at the world ever since. Suicide in the evening is something I’ve been beating my heart with, trying to figure out how you did it.
Instead of walking into see you with your coffee, they walked into find your body, nothing sits well with death in the morning.
I’m still trying to process my moms death.

‘Tu me manques’

If you translated this french phrase into English, it simply means I miss you. Yet, it’s deeper than that, more complex. In french, it means you are missing from me, you’re part of me, you mean so much to me that you became part of me and losing you felt like losing something crucial to my existence. Losing you was like losing my heart, not in the cliche type of way but in the way that it’s a vital piece of me that is now missing from me that kept everything about me alive. You were the light that kept everything from being dark.