we have been here before
that means something
not sure what but it does

there’s 2 weeks 5 years ago that i would have done anything (i mean anything) to change
don’t you know i would have done it all?
football games, brunch with your mom, climbed the stairs of the museum a hundred times if it meant we would be off-center and a little cloudy like my mom said
i keep writing these hoping you will see just one

there’s an absence in my bed that i can’t help but feel with all of me
there’s an absence in my head that i can’t feel at all
let me know when you get the smoke signals that i started sending again
let me know how leo season treated you this year

trying my best to write this as if you’re not running out of time
not everything’s about me but shifting the blame never helped either of us, did it?
i can't help but keep reading and then rereading between the lines of the text messages that i have been getting less and less of since march 13th
recently what i have so far is
"aw, dan
that's incredibly kind"
"what if i get more tired? either from napping or in general"
i don't know what life is going to be like when he finally stops waking up
i guess we are both just waiting to find out

there’s an 80% chance that i became a vegetarian just so i would never again have the opportunity to taste the pizza that we had that weekend at your brothers apartment when we watched 2 seasons of bojack horseman

does it mean something that we have been apart 5x as long as we were together?

i’d rather spend these nights driving than try to catch up to you
i’m almost out of gas anyways
i should have held on a little tighter,
called you a few less times,
moved 212 miles away from home,
brushed myself off and got up from the bathroom floor,
stopped ghosting my therapists,
taken my meds with any form of regularity
sunday nights are for figuring out that voicemails from the front seat of your car can only last so long before the static cuts in and cuts it off too short

you said “thank you for understanding”
so i said “yeah, always”
you said “i’ll hold you to always” and god as long as you can still hold me, i’ll forgive you even if it’s only for a minute
sometimes i’m not sure that i wish that i knew how many minutes were left

i guess it’s fine, i’ll never be able to understand it anyways
we’ll shift the blame from me to you from you to me and back again a couple different ways, call each other when we’re stuck in our own snowbanks, try again a couple years later, rinse, and ******* repeat

maybe it means something that i finally had the first dream about you where you said “we can’t ever do this, remember why it didn’t work out? we have to stop meeting like this”

oh, it couldn’t be me holding back the urge to text you “god i would have had a child with you”

there’s a dent in my pillow where we used to tell our future

the card on my wall from a dorm room full of a dead support system
“we love you danny very very much”