A friend whispered past his drink, I heard the words,
"We all grew up here" and I felt it in my chest like thunder,
Understand that he did not mean 'growing up' as 'growing older'
The days are numbered small and it makes the rain seem so much colder,
Makes it so hard to remember that he was not speaking of the passing of time, because some of us only learned how to wait,
while others learned how not to hate
themselves,
that if we use each other's hands to ease each other's pain,
then a living hell can be a hell of a place.
We started a fire but if we can stare into the glow of the embers, we'll remember that fire fades,
new things grow, and more often than not that means escape.
Move on and forget the stench of youth,
the stain of feigned innocence we wore like a badge of honor and truth, the times we beat our brothers half to death because we thought we were supposed to,
only to laugh about it later and ignore all the growing up we had to do.
But I'm not ready.
Not ready to face it all on unfamiliar ground,
the flames we built from nothing are fading faster,
More like a funeral pyre for the quiet kids who learned how to speak loud
Now I'm racing against the last few weeks just to write it all down,
To tell anyone and everyone that somehow,
we found one another.
Following countless invisible lines like string on a madman's map,
searching for some greater truth or secret,
drawn across distances rivaling oceans and by the strength of our backs,
we collided like glass planets,
like drunk drivers, certain no one would miss us.
Yet as we crashed and did our best to imitate the way that thunder claps, the way that windows shatter,
broken boys and girls found a warmer place to rest, that madman's point of origin was our destination, our home-base,
hovel of a headquarters,
a good head to keep above our freshly wounded shoulders,
We picked up our ugly little pieces and put them back in place as best we could, not realizing that we were still working with the hands of children, no one to tell us to wait a few years, that the strong fingers of soldiers
and survivors know how to mend souls.
In our ignorance of proper placement, we never quite patched all the holes, but found we had built a home,
And every tired old board would find its time to bend and groan,
We were the things that went bump in the dark,
celebrating that we still had some skin on our bones,
and those hellish skeleton screams that kept the neighbors up at night were only friendly fire fights,
subtly discussing the finer points of what we would never miss about being alone,
Doing everything but caring that some of us wouldn't even make it out without giving up the ghost;
that maybe all we had left was hope.
These boys of summer and the girls we loved,
we waged a war in raw throats and untimely sunrises, trying our best to bury the end of our rope.
A place where we found living proof of Nowhere.
A place where we called Silence out by name.
Where we choked on bitter smoke, and forced ourselves to go insane and fall in love, for when we spoke aloud we found that they were very much the same,
And so we're letting go,
But never going away,
Retelling our story
Without a single missing page.
Break down every year into months and every month into days,
To never forget the smell of Summers wasted or the way that the music played
over our cries as we dug our brother's graves,
Creating harmonies much sweeter than the ones we tried to make.
We'll never forget
That anything can be a song if enough of us are singing.
Never forget the strangers who knew us best.
We found the true worth of our memories because we'll never forget the cost,
Of years spent, and not a moment lost.