How are things going? I desperately want to ask
But now I remember how I called you that night crying and desperate
“Sorry dear, I have bigger priorities,” you mumbled nonchalantly in a tone that cut
I guess what was important to you was your short silver dress which you had to keep tugging at
And your layers of mascara which smeared in the heat and the sweat
Maybe you didn't feel like being responsible or putting up a fight
Didn't feel like talking in the pulsating strobe lights
Where you drank and danced and smoked,
Your hands around the masculine men with whom you hooked
I wonder if you still would have hung up if you knew I was crying for you.

And one year later you still haven’t changed
You’re out of school and awfully deranged
Lying at the side of the road in a drunken stupor,
Stinking of smoke and giggling hoarse
Your dress riding up mid-thigh and your heels strewn across the street
Ordering McDonald’s, planting fries in your friend’s garden throwing fits
Sitting in trolleys in supermarkets at 3 am in the morning screaming at the top of your lungs and I
Miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you.
If I ever saw you again I’d bury my face in your long raven hair and whisper how much you meant to me, once.
I’d stroke your whiter than white skin, touched and kissed by fifty other men
Bruised by the very people you call your friends
And I’d cry in your chest and tell you to come back
If all you’d do is swig down a bottle of beer
And not look my way, but cackle cruelly wailing dear
I would die more than a little inside

You stopped caring about anything that was supposed to matter,
Like being better than everyone and writing beautiful badass essays about saving the sharks
(And understanding everything I never understood about myself and laughing at the things I used to say and pinning my name with stars on your charts)
You forgot your dreams of wanting to travel and petting kangaroos, carving out something of yourself so they’d remember you for your passion
and loneliness is the only place at which you’re stationed.

Now all you’re doing is living monotonously, “the *** life” you call it, your dreams all burnt up in the intoxication of the hookah you pretend to love and dissolved in the alcohol you swallow now pulsing through your veins.
Come back.