1.) You had more spiders in your house than friends, and you liked it that way.
You said they taught you not to fear the dead, but rather the living.
Sometimes I wish you never embraced death so much.

2.) I've collected memories of you like fireflies in glass jars and I hid them beneath the floorboards because I'm scared the glass will break
and I'll have to watch you fly away again.

3.) You were six foot and three inches of religious metaphors deeply rooted in your veins
and I think that's why you injected so much sin.

4.) I wish I could show you that the world is twice as big as we had thought
but there's still a lack of soil fertile enough for bodies like ours to grow.
I would have cut holes in the ozone if it meant I could give you the rain.

5.) It would have been your twenty third birthday on Monday and I just hope I finally get the courage to visit your grave.

6.) I don't believe much in the idea of god, but I believe firmly in your ghost.
I don't believe in hell, I think the concept is too fragile and the principal too impressionable.
But for your sake, I sure do hope there's a heaven.

7.) Sometimes I wake up at midnight and call your old number just praying that it was all a dream. But the only dream is the one where you tell me it wasn't my fault and the awakening is knowing that it was.

8.) I still don't have it in me to say your name out loud.

9.) I don't think I've been happy since 2011 and I miss you every day,
but I miss you most in the month of September because that's when it all just slipped away.

You are the shade of
my nonchalant soul
and as empty
as my heart