i guess it makes sense that one of our favorite bands would break up because everything we ever touched turned to dust in our hands

why can't i bury you like you must have buried me?

didn't you know we were supposed to burn the city to the ground?

i've had almost 2 years of radio silence and i can't tell if i just can't hear the music anymore

if i read/write one more ******* poem about bed sheets i am going to hang myself with mine

i need a phone call
i need a rain coat

i stay up most nights these days wondering if you would be proud of me
maybe we needed to fall apart so i could put myself back together and be whole without the pieces i thought were always meant to fit

i wonder if your mom is proud of you
i wonder if she wishes i could have made you stay and i wonder if she knows i miss her
why did you drop out of college?
did you forget how to put yourself back together?
are you happy where you're sleeping?
do you ask yourself similar questions about me?
i wonder if the new versions of us would fall in love just as easily
and for all it's worth
i hope you know you can be so much better and do so much more and you were always meant to travel through space and time and i don't think i want to wait for you anymore

originality is dead and i killed all the artists
i thought my words were my own but i am getting pretty tired of dollar store versions of my own suffering
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but what am i supposed to do when i can't differentiate between sincerity and someone who is going to spit my words back in my face

someone should tell the world to stop ******* turning because i didn't sign up for a lifetime of being left behind

can you believe i am still waiting for us to come full-circle?

i hope you never told anyone the way i cried during *** that one time i was ******* in your dorm room
i didn't know i could look so beautiful with nothing on my body until you showed me that polaroid
i have since ripped it up because the people we were in that picture were never meant to weather the storm that was 212 miles of highways and backroads and the ******* distance between us  

we listened to a playlist that we didn't make
we were actors in a scene that we never should have set
staring at the broken mirror in your bedroom showed me only fractals of myself and i could see exactly the versions of me that you would leave behind

it's been almost two years but
do you still think about me when you get high in your bedroom?
do you ever think about that night?

dear interdimensional space traveler,
it's been both an honor and a privilege to watch you traverse far and wide and maybe you will find your way back to the year and 4 months when you filled the space on the other side of my mattress
do you miss the gravity that pulled you to me?
do you miss linear time and when we were on the same wavelength?
maybe when you finally "came home" you forgot where that even was
is her apartment floor your new safe haven?
212 miles is too close for us to have given up so easily and you were still light years away
time has stopped here since you left, interdimensional space traveler
i hope our time and space aligns again

there are 2 gigabytes on my phone of voicemails and 99% are from you and i wonder if our inboxes mirror each other or if you deleted the ones i used to send you
i thought i would have a lifetime of "goodnight and i love you"s
now all i am left with is a slow phone and the inability to call anyone

i'm jealous of the people that now get to know you and wonder if they will ever take it for granted like i never did

i want to drink myself into a place no one can reach me
i want the room to spin so i can sit still and feel the world moving and cracking and tectonic plates shifting beneath my feet
i want to dance to music i don't like when i'm sober
i want to feel as beautiful as i feel when i'm drunk every day
i want to drink until all i am left with is empty cups and happy hiccups and i want to call my exes and tell them how lucky they were to have me and how bad timing was never a good excuse
i want to wrap a telephone cord around my fingers and then my body and i want to feel electricity in my hands and i want the world to spin because i tell it to

i'm going to start a calvary of all the people you've abandoned on your quest for "self-discovery"
a ****** bandcamp demo ep isn't going to make you any less miserable, babe, i can almost promise you that
all the validation in the world isn't going to undo your damage on the people that you left more broken then when you found them
i'm still too scared to talk to your best friend because our common denominator left us high and dry but i'm sure we've both been trying to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of you leaving us
it's been over a year and i'm still reeling from our last conversation because i have always tried to ignore the inevitable
and call me delusional for thinking that maybe it wasn't my fault

what the **** are you supposed to do when the ghosts of 222 reasons plaster themselves to your bedroom walls and fill your head with all the other 222+ reasons it's all your fault?
how does it make any sense that i have to live in the spaces you broke my heart over and over every day and you got to take a train and leave it all behind
i haven't written a poem in years that didn't ask desperate questions or consist of a thousand different apologies, and with that, i ask you "were you ever really sorry?"

i am the 1 am drunk text
i am the family pictures popping up on  your newsfeed
i am the polaroid at the bottom of your desk drawer
i am the modern baseball song that you can't seem to skip
i am the candy wrappers in your car door
i am the cd stuck in your car radio that is just me singing a song i never should have written for you
i am the way a dorm room bed is always just big enough
i am the draft of a poem that was never just right

and

you are the space between the lines of the poems that aren't fixing anything
you are the dried up corsage in the back of my closet
you are the third step on the stairs into the basement where i swear i can still see stains of mascara on the carpet from november 8, 2015
you are the post card i never sent
you are the post card i sent but never should have
you are the phone calls i can't make
you are the nightmares i have where we are both running from something not clear to us


now that i've set the scene are you sure you want to delete your audition tape?
are you sure that your first try was good enough?

i'm in a long-term relationship with my depression
and she's a ******* jealous *****
i'm sorry that sometimes three's a crowd but she is the one constant in my life and i'm terrified of the sadness ending because then who am i?

i will never be able to find solace in substance the way you helped yourself cope with the loss of us long before you had your feet out the door
there is no possible articulation that i can find myself capable of that would make you understand what it is like to lose you
i was stuck in an infinite loop of the same words over and over again telling me that i could have done something, that it was all my fault, and that my love was not enough
my love was more than enough!!

sorry that almost everything i've ever written has been about you but really i've always been one to get hung up on the bad things
maybe the reason i can't shake you from me is that i can't possibly wrap my head around the fact that the person i was in love with no longer exists and that this new man that has taken his place is just wearing his skin and i never got to have a proper funeral for the boy you used to be

"hey just wondering but why did your dad unfriend me on facebook?"
i mean he never even called me your girlfriend even after over a year but at this point i am not sure if that counts for anything

"um excuse me but i am triggered by your tweets about your girlfriend"
mainly because they are just recycled versions of things you used to say about me

"but yeah ok that's fine!!!"
hope she tucks you in at night and remembers that you never texted "i love you" to me and that you only posted six pictures of me on instagram during our whole relationship but really who's counting??

"**** the both of you honestly"
thanks for sending your bff to like this tweet because we all know that none of us are ready for the long overdue confrontation that is obsolete

"is it raining where you are?"
i hope it never stops ******* raining wherever you are

thanks for letting me borrow your netflix account so that i had something to do with my hours of you not calling me

i just think it's kind of funny how you were capable of spending so much money on tattoos yet you were unable to afford the train home to see me
i'm not one to harp on cliches about your lack of commitment to me but really how the **** did you rationalize that?
we're coming up on the year mark of that phone call that sent me back to therapy and into my mothers arms and it's quite honestly always been all your fault

hey, tell me again about your dead brother
and how falling in love with you should never have been an option on this multiple choice test that was our "relationship"
i killed the chia pet you got me for christmas
and now i can't stop watering the dead plants that are starting to fill my house because i have never once been capable of keeping anything good in my life

broken mirrors neckties garter belts thigh highs *** drunk in love soft shirts tye dyed sheets polaroids constellations philadelphia uber dinosaur statues keurigs red lights short skirts twitter parking spaces tattoos ***  trains train stations train tracks grey hair modern baseball coffee mugs mason jars museums

he called me less and less and less and less until i couldn't remember the sound of static over the phone
2. my bed stretched bigger and bigger until i swear my whole house was just space that he wasn't in anymore and meanwhile he was looking for someone else to take up the lonely space between his sheets
3. "abandonment issues" had become more of a personality trait than i anticipated
4. people began tip-toeing around me, like i was glass on the edge of a coffee table teasing the world with the possibility of my shards cutting everyone and everything around me
5. i stopped singing while washing the dishes
6. i stopped running while crossing the street
7. my future was no longer a glowing exit sign on a highway off ramp and instead became the vastness that is inside my own head
8. i started remembering who i was before him and now that i'm in the aftermath of the natural disaster that was "us", i have the realization every day that i deserved more

i deserved so much ******* better

"my heart is the vacant lot at the end of your street that is full of garbage and broken glass" and other cliches that people should stop writing about
what is my capacity of my ability to love?
is it possible that i was so full of it that now i am my own metaphorical sinkhole?

talking about forgetting each other and assigning half-lifes to our memories as if they were radioactive in hopes that they'll disintegrate like the hazardous materials they have always been

i've sat here for hours trying to come to some realization that i am nothing and everything all at once, a walking paradox full to the brim but still so ******* empty that it hurts

coming apart at the seams never looked so appealing

sorry that i stained your pillowcase with tears over someone who left me farther behind than his old bedroom and his mom and his cats and his backyard and his kitchen floor where our conversations could have meant something

i've been thinking more and more about the definition of true love and i'm realizing every day that it's not the boy who ****** me over twice for the same girl
and it's not the ex who told me he was going to **** himself if we didn't get back together
true love isn't tragic endings
i'm learning that true love is the feeling you get when you're in the passenger side of a car and your best friends are yelling along to a song you didn't know they knew

i just think it's kind of ****** up that you escaped the fray with barely a scratch
and i still pick at my scabs every day
maybe if i pull myself apart piece by piece there won't be anything left to hurt anymore

Dear ****** ***,

hey so yeah i'm writing this on our 1 yr anniversary because it'll be cool to see what i felt about you a year ago and stuff. so, i guess here's a letter to future us!! maybe we will close the gap of 212 miles and we'll have rats and they'll be named bean and peach. we can finish our doughnut tour of philly and wake up every morning to blanket forts and special k and i will be your sun every day. all i know is that now i can't imagine a future without you in it. thanks for 2 great years and i can't wait to write you a card for infinity.

love always or whatever
-danny

oh god i would do anything to see leaves or fireworks or forget-me-nots or snow or tadpoles or anything extending beyond the current day

i'm sorry that our plans never made it to blueprints 

is there something about me that screams impermanence?

am i the human embodiment of a rest stop?

go ahead and make complaints about the texts you aren't getting back but remember that i endured months of a screaming silence that hurt my ears and rendered me a walking empty body
sorry that i couldn't be enough for a family that set me up to fail the second i stepped in the door
he's bringing her places we used to go and it's to overwrite the data already deeply encoded
i'm sure that our footprints and traces of who we were are still everywhere we ever went because time with him was on a different continuum and they shouldn't be trying to upset the balance

2 years ago today he said he would be back in 2 minutes
1 year ago today he said he would never leave, even for 2 minutes
3 months ago he said he would be there in 2 minutes
2 months, 29 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes ago he said he had had enough of our minutes together

i've been holding onto the idea of 2 minutes so much longer

i would like to point out that it's pretty ****** up that you covered her favorite song on valentine's day while we were still together
and you crooned about someone not calling you
why didn't you call me?
maybe your phone lines were too ******* in her for you to even be able to say goodnight

i hope your band never gets famous
i hope your next girlfriend will hate me
i hope you hate christmas because of that song i wrote
i hope that someone hurts you like you hurt me
i hope she finds those polaroids from when you still loved me
i really hope you fail out of school and have to move back home so you can be stuck in the place you hate the most
i hope that i never finish adding to this list

he told me that "this distance isn't a death sentence and we will serve our time"
i am still serving my time but he got out on bail

when did the calls past midnight become a part of who we used to be rather than who we were going to be
at what point did you stop loving me and when did you realize she would make you happier when will you realize she will never make you any ******* happier and your self-serving misery won't be fixed by having a different girl between your sheets than the one that promised to love you even when you didn't love her
do you know if she will beg you to stay when you think you found the one who will fill your void you put there by yourself?
i've never been your answer but that doesn't mean i can't ask the questions that put this silence between us

hope everything is ok with you on your side of this map that you have made for us
"voicemailbox is full"
"text not delivered"
i don't know how else i can tell you that everything is not fine with me
and i haven't slept in weeks
and the sight of your pictures don't make me smile anymore
and i've already started readying my battleships for the nuclear fallout that i can tell is inevitable
and your side of the map is no longer familiar territory
it's overgrown and the walls you've built are bulletproof
when did our peace treaty become null and void, love?
at what point did you decide that your side of the map didn't need our alliance?

don't tell me that we need some space
when there's 212 miles between our beds

don't tell me that i'm your sun
when you stopped letting me peak through the blinds of your darkened bedroom

don't tell me there's 222 reasons to love me
when you were only able to tell me a few for wanting to leave me

don't write public poems about me that i "wasn't supposed to read"
as if i were the one that broke your heart and not the other way around

don't tell me that i'm your best fried
because best friends don't hurt each other like we did

wait, don't tell me you love me
because words like that don't mean anything unless they have somewhere to rest

i hate your tattoos and the red hot chili peppers and the word "forever" never tasted so good until you kissed it into my mouth but i hate that taste now and no amount of alcohol or antidepressants can make it go away and my parents are worried about me but i'm worried about you even though i shouldn't be so i write these phrases that should form coherent thoughts but none of the words seem to line up and i'm not going to help you get through this because i have been where you stand and the power doesn't get to be yours anymore