The screams were so raw
I’m so sorry.
I hear the sirens call

The bodies lay on the floor
Covered in blood
**** one more

No! Stop! I have to fight back
The voice says to keep killing
I can’t do that-

But, maybe just one
Yes! ****!
One final shot of the gun

That’s it! Now you’re thinking
My hand shakes as the gun is raised
The barrel pointed at the voice, my heart sinking

No wait! What are you doing?
Bam! And the voice stops
We fall to the ground as one

He lived in my head,
Now we’re both dead.

The thing is
I’m not who you made me up to be
And I never claimed to be as good
As you think I am.
But you’re way better than you claimed to be.

And I, am the dirt under your perfectly manicured nails.
Like you taught me how to fly and I…
Fell.
You pushed me off a cliff and thought I would soar,
But I sunk.
Like you put me up so high and
Hey! I’m down here.
You’re jumping from mountain top to mountain top,
And I’m crawling through the valleys.

Like you love so deep and I,
Hate. Myself.
I hate myself.
I hate you,
For putting me on clouds with you and expecting me to float,
When we both know I only know how to fall.

Like you always seem so confused
When you look down at me,
But if you’re a bird then I’m,
Well. I’m not a bird.

And I’m not trying to bring you down,
But I can’t be brought up.
And I’m not saying you’re trying too hard,
But I am who I am.

You are smooth classical,
And I’m heavy beats.
You're brunch with the family
And I’m 10 o’clock microwave dinner.

Good and bad are relative.
Next to you, I’m a sketchy motel.
Next to the crazy guy on the train,
I could be a 5 star hotel

But the funny thing is how,
You can be so blinded by love
That you see diamonds
Where there is really dirt.

You see me as a sunny afternoon on the beach
But I’m just a cloudy day at work.
And I have grown to accept I'm just average

Now I need to ask you for a favor,
And I don’t think I’m asking for too much.
Will you please accept that I will never be
Your made-just-right afternoon tea.
But I would be happy to be
Your room temperature coffee after work.
But more importantly,
Your just below average girlfriend.

Of the many ways to tell you how I feel.
I could shout out loud,
Write in the dirt.
Paint in smoke across miles
Of the sky all the ways
I love you.
But none of it would mean as much.

So with the last ink,
Of this last pen.
I’ll write the words
Which too would be my last breath.
I love you, my darling.

I stared down the street as your car gradually faded from my view,
You slowed almost completely to a stop,
And a tiny part of me hoped you’d stay.
But you kept going.

And that’s when I realized as fairytale like as this week had been,
Not everything in life can be a movie.
Even though an hour earlier we were lying in my bed crying,
And you kissed me really, like you were giving me a part of you to keep,
And you looked at me and said,
“I’m going to marry you someday,
And we’ll look back on tonight and it won’t matter.”

And we kept kissing like if we never stopped
Time would
To accommodate us.

And now the next morning I’m in my bed,
Wet face and puffy lips
Trying to forget you were ever here.
But my whole room is falling apart without you.

I woke up and there was puke on the floor next to me.
The lights on my Christmas tree blew out.
My body shook and I watched as the ceiling lights gave up too.

The hardest part was cleaning you up.
I sat in the middle of a ruin of you.
You left a lot here you know.
Four hair ties,
A cell phone cord,
A travel sized mouth wash,
An unfinished can of Coke Vanilla,
And me.

I felt like somehow if I picked up all your things and cleaned my room
It would be easier to forget you were ever here.
But I’m in bed writing this now and I can still see you next to me.
I can still feel your hands rub my neck.
And as I read this,
I can still feel your lips
And smell your perfume.

I took down all of our new year’s decorations.
I put away everything that reminded me of you and I still can’t stop thinking
Maybe if I had just begged a little bit harder,
Maybe if I had shown you how really desperate I was for you to stay,
You would have.

But you left me here in my little life
And my little problems came back
And your face suddenly appeared everywhere
In this little ******* town.
And I now know how perfect life can be with you,
And that makes living a little while longer,
Worth it.

Sometimes I stare into the night sky and I realize how small we are.
I look into infinity and
It doesn’t look back because
I am a spec amongst bigger things and smaller things
And life and death are everywhere
And what am I to a universe that
We, humans, the smartest life we know to exist,
Cannot even wrap our brains around?

And then I think about homework.
But how am I supposed to even think about homework
When the sky is always present above our heads
Filled with limitless possibilities that I can get lost in for decades.
I could waste perfect days lying in the grass day dreaming up anything,
But you want me to memorize math equations?

During the day all seems so hopeful and bright.
I think of the way your hair would move in the breeze and
I imagine your big eyes filled with wonder and curiosity
As you stare into the clouds.
Clouds made of the ideas people dream up during class
While their teacher tells them how to cite sources in MLA format.

And at night my fascination with the sky becomes
Less excited and more scared.
I think not of the way your hair would move in the breeze,
But of how your hair would move
While someone else tucked it behind your ear.
And the noise you’d make as they kissed your neck
Crimson lips, swollen with lust.

Somehow the stars don’t give me dreams,
They give me nightmares.
Of you behind my back,
On your back with other women,
Or worse men.
But you’re always there to calm my fears of betrayal
And kiss me back to reality.

This life is one that,
As far as I know, we only live once.
And we can’t waste it getting caught up in the what ifs of the past,
But we can waste it getting caught up in the wonder of what else lies outside of our grasp.
And we should ponder the unanswered questions of the universe

Because when we can’t sleep at night and
We can’t focus in class and
When we are drowning in the stress that comes with the human life,
We can look up at the sky, and remember
That we are all small.
Specs to the universe and

If the ocean can rise and fall with the moon in perfect harmony
And the birds can fly thousands of miles to warmth
And our dogs can always know when it’s time to eat
Without the ability to read clocks,
Then we can always find our way out of these messes we inevitably fall in to.

I never know any of the answers,
But this life is one worth living,
And I’ll spend it trying to figure it all out.
And I’ll never do my homework.

I sat in my living room watching Modern Family with my dad and my mom mom
When my mom mom turns to my dad and says,
Todd I am so proud of you for not having any homosexual children.
Now I realize this could’ve been the moment I come out.
But instead of feeling like that was my open door,
I felt like someone had just pushed me back inside the closet
And slammed it shut.

When you think of a homophobic person,
You imagine someone who is mean and extremely religious.
But my mom mom is a kind and generous woman.  
Anyone can be homophobic.
I was homophobic.
Raised in a “Christian” household I grew up in a church.
My roots were in prayer and god was my sun.
I shamed gays and eventually
I shamed myself.

You always hear how people come out to their families,
but next time,
Ask them how they came out to themselves.
Because that is the hardest part.
Or at least it was for me.
I ripped up all my roots, blocked out the sun, and dug into myself
To change the parts of me I thought were law.
Things my dad had preached to my church
About gays being an abomination
And now here I am, the abomination he spoke so often of.

Once you start realizing your parents weren’t always right,
You have to start making your own judgments.
What do you believe in anymore if up to that point,
Every opinion you defended was one you took from your parents,
Passed down to you like character traits.

My dad and I are both stubborn
And we were both homophobic until
I started not just wanting to be certain pretty girls,
But I stared wanting to be on certain pretty girls.
I had to change every part of me that hated myself
And I found so much love in me that I never thought I had
And suddenly a lot of things made sense.

In a perfect world, my family would dig up their roots too.
Look to God and realize that
He is about love for everyone without the “no ****” before it.
God is not homophobic.
My family is.

As I stare across this fire,
The heat from the flame is
Directly reflected in my eye.
I know they see my jealousy.
That girl with hair as warm as this fire,
Is not looking at me.
Not like she should be.

Instead she’s making secretive glances at her boyfriend.
While my face is heating up past boiling point.
I can feel my heart ripping itself apart
Literally piece by piece.

It starts with all the parts that are attracted to this girl.
Ripping away all the gasps when she smiled at me.
Then the times she held me close.
The memory carved into my heart
Of that ******* smell she carries.
Like home.

More specifically, my heart rips away that night,
I fell for her in a diner bathroom.
On the floor while I was falling to pieces
And she put her arms around them
And held me together.

She said it would all be okay.
But it’s not right now.
Not while I watch her snuggle on this cold October night
With this boy who I really actually like,
But couldn’t possibly hate more
In this very moment.

I want to rip them apart,
But apparently I settle for ripping myself apart.
My heart scratches at all the times
They warned,
Don’t fall for a straight girl.
But I didn’t listen.
And I couldn’t listen.

And here everyone looks for love,
But I’ve found it
And let me tell you she’s not as pretty
As they say she is.
See Love isn’t a *****,
But she is deceiving.
She pushes you head over heels,
Then Fate comes over and kicks your ***.

When a gay girl
Falls for a straight one.
She hits the ground.
And in my experience,
I’m still trying to get up.