I have always imagined your touch as sunlight
As the heat trapped beneath my blanket when I first wake up
As the rug warming my bare feet in the morning
But that was before I realized I was loving a ghost
Before I saw my breath in front of my face
And realized we had just shared our first kiss
Before I wrapped my arms around myself after walking outside
Feeling the air cut through my skin like a thousand knives
Now I see you in the bottom of every glass
When I am left feeling even emptier than before I took a drink
Now I see you at the bottom of every staircase
As a reminder that even if I would jump
You wouldn't be there to break my fall
Because no matter how far a ghost's arms may reach
They'd never be solid enough to catch me.

the three of us sat with music playing and the tires rolling and
unplanned adventures in front of us on the road.
With a few bucks in the bank and a bunch of ideas floating in our skulls,
the aches and pains to escape the mundane were finally being treated.
My best buddies and I spoke only out of true stoke and excitement over our lives.
Laughter carried the weight in all of our conversations.
Each of our words were hardly coherent because they were beaten through
giggles, coughs, and mumbles.
Nothing was to be taken seriously and
nothing was to be judged.
We were free to mumble whatever words we pleased, so long as we laughed.
The car muffled its own contribution to our discussions about cats, rebellion, pounding Mountain Dew, and jumping off of ****.
Those things are our only cure from monotony,
so we spoke of them often.
But we also shared thoughts on intellect, society, passion, and time;
however, we took them out of their limitations.
To be friends means to leave the judgment to the strangers,
and to help each other grow.
We followed these guidelines as an unspoken constitution.
As friends, we understand that there is much more to a person than can be expressed in words,
so words take the short end and we do not care much for their maintenance.

I want to be a substance abuser.

I want the vapidity
of my own words
to evaporate.
I want the void
to rev itself up,
and spin itself into
a voracious tornado.

I want to extinguish
the emptiness
with this epitaph.
I want language
to bend to my will,
leaning and looming
as an entity of entirety.

If I should be so lucky,
I hope to die
of an overdose.


-LP

Stop talking to the people who are not worth your time, who cause you unnecessary drama, and make you feel worse about yourself.

Be honest with yourself.

You have fewer friends than you thought. Your cafeteria table slowly decreases in size, as do your social commitments, but you do not have any drama, no shallow or fake nonsense. Slowly, everyone starts to seem annoying, and irritating, and you do not want to converse with any of them, ever again.

Do not have many friends, and sway between feeling sorry for yourself and feeling like you are superior.

When the one friend you do have does not come to school because she has to take a driving test, eat your lunch alone, and listen to music on your iPod so you do not appear as alone as you feel. Realize your condition has gotten much worse.

People talk to you. You feel ecstatic, even though you won’t admit that to yourself.
You get a shot of adrenaline when you feel as if you’ve breached their walls.
You try to say something—an opinion, an agreement, anything.
They ignore you.
You walk away, and think: you are above them anyways.

Do not get invited to parties. Think it is because no one likes you. Be sad; be resentful. Think about all the things you are missing at a dumb party thrown by a sophomore—which is bound to fail, and bound to get broken up by the cops. Realize that the reason you are not invited is more likely because you have never show any interest in parties. Force yourself to feel grateful for the lack of an invitation; no cops will come knocking on your door, asking questions.

Plus, you have to go to work tomorrow, and that is much more important.

When the party does get broken up, pretend that you knew it was a bad idea and that you had never wanted to go. Listen to the stories of running from the police, through thorn bushes, with a twinge of jealousy.

Not only do you not go to parties; you do not have any plans for the weekends at all.

Never have sleepovers. Instead, wake up at 12:00 in the afternoon, stay in your pajamas, and have a Netflix marathon of Supernatural. Eat a lot of junk food and think, “**** it!” and then immediately regret it, you are trying to lose weight.

If you lose weight, you won’t be a loser anymore.

If you lose weight, people will still remain the same.

You cry, because you think it’s what you should do.
You feel pathetic.
The tears running down your cheeks do not do justice for the raw, uncomfortable feeling making your stomach clench.
You are stronger than all of that.

You sit on your bed and think about a better time, a better place, when you felt accepted, loved, and even popular.

Think about the time you weighed a good fifty pounds less. You were on top of the world.

Talk about your future, because at least you have them beat there. You will go all the way.

Think about your straight A’s. Get on the scale. 145, 160, 194 pounds; why do those numbers matter? The 98’s are the ones that are going to get you into a good college.

College…
High school.
Present.

Walk through the double doors with staggering confidence.

Talk about how you are a loser—it makes people believe that you do not actually see yourself that way. Losers would never admit that they are a loser. Plus, the people you are talking to are obligated to deny the fact that you a loser, no matter their opinion. It’s common courtesy. Sometimes you want them to deny it, and sometimes you want to prove to them, and to yourself, that it is okay to be a loser.

You define yourself as one because sometimes you are proud of it.
Why?

You think: I do not want to be friends with these people; they are annoying, petty, and shallow. I am much more independent and mature. I’m off to better, bigger things.

Later
You think: it would be nice to have a few more friends, people to talk to, people who care.


Get assigned a creative essay titled, “How to Become a…”

Choose: “How to Become a Loser”

Plan on the piece being light, funny, and paradoxical, ending it with a sarcastic, but optimistic line.
Realize that you are not the loser; everyone else is.

Doubt yourself.
Realize this is no longer a humorous essay.

Last night she me asked what your name was
That’s a lie
What she really asked was if I liked anyone back home
But you see, yours was the only name I thought of
You are the only person I think of
Romantically linked but we're still not in sync
A broken mp3 file
Corrupted
Wrongly titled
It begins with M, I tell her
'Two Ms'?' she questions and I look at her as we walk
And she turns to me and says
'Does that mean you’re so in love you’ve become the same person?'
But how do I explain our initials are the only things holding us together
We are so far apart
More like A and Z
At opposite ends of the alphabet
Just waiting for the time to come together
Does this make us crazy?
I’m not sure
I don’t know what this makes us
Are we anything at all?
Last week I nearly kissed a boy with your name
Don’t tell me that is a coincidence
I have believed in signs ever since I could read them
“DO NOT ENTER” my thought stream
Just carry on swimming in the “DEEP END”
Because you know I will always be a life jacket
Waiting for you to surface.
So, face me again
With your real, pained expression
Of a broken home and natural intelligence
You always saw the world through a lens,
Clearer
Cleared your mind of anything to do with me
I am still waiting, holding your camera case
For when you decide to put that life away
Zip it up and find a new one in me
M, I miss you
Like the last bus home from school
Like the sugar in a diet
Like the 29th of February
Maybe in four years’ time, when I say your name
It’ll sound an awful lot like mine.

If it would make you love me I would lie back
And bottle the secret, concealing it underneath my rib cage like a bottled ship, the twigs and scraps of fabric decomposing like the bones of leaves, dry and crumbling into different dusts
Actually, I wouldn’t even ask you to love me, and I would still position myself in some sparse pretty purgatory for you
Sitting in silence, on cold to touch hospital like bed sheets
There is colour slicked inside my chest, thick in parts as if it were chocolate applied with a brush inside a mould but for you I would keep the light out in some dull opaque haze
Flecks of my soul are rainbow enamels but if I could I would reduce them to dull metal powders for you
I would give up all others because they have no clean sails unlike you
I would allow you all those one syllable words