I tend to spill my thoughts when I feel safe.
Something about the way
I am to lean on you.
My love bleeds into the smallest details
And controversies
And the things I’ve laid my heart in,
Even if, to the rest of the world, they are mundane.

But I forget that you are broken too,
And in attempt to protect me, you neglected to heal.
I don’t have the inhumanity to tell you that even with your sacrifices
I still ended up crumpled
Like the bits of paper I poured my heart into.

When your response is to slash at me blindly,
And ignore your coughs as you’re buried
In the hope that seeped from the slits I’ve made,
I now have long learnt to hold my tongue.

Even as the taste of blood floods my mouth
I will acknowledge your jagged pieces
As I wish you had acknowledged them yourself;
As I wish you could acknowledge mine.

My periods turn to semicolons
My suicide notes to poetry
My goodbyes became hellos
The blades turn to sunflowers
And the bullets, a rose
My heart still is broken
But the pieces have been found
Death isn’t for me anymore
What is, in the here and now
I still don’t feel enough
But I am alive
And that’s enough to say
Today is not the day I die.

It’s always about if you were gone.
If you’d be away with the wind, never for me to see again.

But have you thought about the emptiness if I went first?
My hesitant touch of comfort turned ghostly
The hollowness that remains when my presence is unfound
Or the haunting silence that replaces my laughter –

Would you finally look into my tears and cries
When I’m the first to be six feet under?