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

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

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

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

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

let me know if i am being too cruel when i say “if we met now would we even recognize each other?”
years of shoving nicotine and alcohol down our throats and foreign mouths on ours amplify the passing of the short amount of time it really has been
it’s not like me to depend on a new substance but god the crackling of a 4 year old voicemail is like the throat hit of a lifetime
my joints still ache like that weekend in the city and i don’t know if i’ll ever stop hurting
i feel like we are fighting the inevitable and i am the only one who knows it
let me know if you get this smoke signal

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?

4 years ago today i was riding the high of a first kiss 3 months in the making
we fell in love amidst curfews and open doors and a tendency to semi-slow dance between half truths and part lies

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 am taking a plane tomorrow
i will be 1,178.6 miles away from you and i hope i will feel safer
knowing exactly how far away we are from each other helps me to breathe a little easier
my mind is constantly focused on 212 and 222 and november 8th and 2015
i am hoping that new mileage will clear up some space
i am sorry for what happens next, "love"
this distance was a death sentence

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

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

"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

oh my god she's in your kitchen in your parents house
does she know about the ghost of the cat that occupies the space in front of the oven?
does she know about the ghosts of us that roam the hall and the basement and your bedroom and the piano bench and the back porch and the shower and your driveway
god i don't miss the open doors but i would give anything to be alone with you in your parents house again
everything felt less real when you were two states and a train ride west of me
there's something about you being a potential 20 minute drive away that reminds me of my first suicide note
my second to last phone call from you was december 31, 2015 at 11:56 pm and i wish someone told me i would only see you again 2 more times following that
if only i had known that this would be the year i could swallow pills without any water maybe i would have kept my prescription

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!!

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

i used to paint the town red with the blood from my mouth
i could count the phases of the moon from the crescents caused by the digging of my nails into my hands
it was easier that way

late night side streets accompanied by no one but a playlist and a flashlight
i ran while crossing the road to get to anywhere
sometimes i wonder if the street light near the cemetery still flickers
and if i have any claim to the gravel behind the post office
does your mom ever tell you that i drive by your house?
when i finally woke up beside the lake i didn’t know it would feel like nothing

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?

i have been spending more time trying to force a different timeline
stand here, tug the string, open close open close open close the laundry room door
the sun still shines the same here and there and nowhere and everywhere and trying to make sense of it all could take all night

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

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

the nonexistent satisfaction of what i’ve come to know as past tense
i’m still feeling your handwriting tracing my collarbones and cheeks and the way tears seemed to float off my face and into the pockets of your jeans

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

i guess i’ll vape about it
shake about it
crawl on my hands and knees down the stairs, hold my breath about it

i can hear an engine up to a mile and a half away because you evolve to have supersonic hearing when 60 seconds will make all the difference

let’s write some more songs about a self-fulfilling prophecy
but maybe things will be different if we learned to hear the subtext
imagine an okay but tattooed by the mile
scrawling my gods on 4 walls that get closer together by the hour
shift the focus and
for now it’s enough

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

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

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

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 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

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 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

"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?

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'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

i should have let them block your number because a bittersweet self-concluding end would have been honey and sweet dreams compared to the ***** and panic attacks that i have started with this saturday morning
try and keep my name out of your mouth because my ears can’t handle the deafening ringing
catch me driving 90 on the highway waiting for my ribs to crack

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

no one comes home anymore because these streets don’t carry the same weight that we used to
i drive by houses
because i don’t know who i am without some sort of substance in my system and i don’t know what to do once the final laugh of the night dies in the way only an intoxicated joke can

the rules of the game are simple
keep the dust from collecting and keep your hands out of your hair
keep the sink empty
god i have got to get out of my house
i’m going to eat the concrete from the streets and scrape my knees so they have something to talk about

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

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?"

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

please for the love of god don’t let her in your bedroom and the kitchen floor and where your mom saw us share moments we would have loved to have not kept secret

no longer aspiring for greatness, simply aspiring to find the middle ground

i think what hurts the most is that i have been holding onto memories of you longer than you ever held me

this isn’t appropriate or necessary but for the past 3 years i have been aching for an another intoxicated text that would tell me i came up in a conversation

how can i rewrite a goodbye in terms either of us can cope with?
let’s blame the weather or the medication or the elephant politely sitting on the loveseat or the piles of ***** laundry
we can’t keep meeting like this

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?

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