I still walk past bridges and imagine us jumping off of them
Maybe it would feel the same when we hit the bottom
As it does when we speak to each other.

Do you know what it feels like to watch the walls of your house collapse onto your shoulder blades?
I used to love to watch you skip over the puddles trying not to wet your feet

It was the same way you held your hands out of the car window on the freeway
Flying, so fast.

You told me " i dont care what anyone thinks "
but the truth is-
i hate the way you hold your breath before you laugh at my jokes
like you're about to blow out a candle but you're just not quite sure you want to watch the flame go out

I hate when your eyes disappear into the ceiling of your bedroom -
the same place your dreams go every night
as they flash and turn into lightning bolts of images of who you used to be

In them are your screams
They are the sounds of your alarm clock before you hit the snooze

You told me you were happy
if happy is a place where babies cry and bees go hungry because flowers are dead.
and thorns capacitate roses, weeds overgrow petals, and dogs bark endlessly into the night.
starving and cold.

the way you look at yourself is the way I look at you too
shivering and crooked like a bad park job

I imagine your promises like a sealed letter without a stamp to the wrong address on a Sunday morning

your voice makes me violently scratch at the roots of my follicles and fight with myself over whether to submerge my head into the beads of the water or to just finish conditioning my hair

your laugh burns. it echos through lobbies like elevators waiting to be pushed and children waiting for the waving hand of their mother to slowly dissipate and dissolve down the winding road

I remember the sound of eggshells crackling underneath my feet walking through my living room
Wishing that the panels on the doors and the fibers in the carpet could speak to me, or Ask me how my day was

You became the fibers in my carpet sewing my pieces together holding my lungs in place filling them with oxygen

And then slowly just letting them burst.