Dear Shyla
I keep the suicide note that you've forgotten you wrote our mother folded up in a small wooden box in the corner of my bedroom
It's there so that on my worst days
When I've run out of friends who will listen
I can remind myself that other people feel this too
And after all we've been through apart sometimes our depressions and our mistakes are the only way I can remember we're related

Dear mom
I've hidden a diary you kept while struggling through your ill-fated relationship with my father
In it there are weight loss goals
Vows of marital celibacy
Existential questions
But mostly just a whole lot of why's leading you to answers you wanted to hear
While all of the things you needed to say you left in the blank spaces between the lines on the pages you never made it to
Your favorite thing to say after the divorce was that you were grateful to no longer have to walk on eggshells to protect his feelings
It has been twelve years and you still can't admit the feelings you were trying to protect were your own
And your feet still hurt

Dad
I have an envelope of pictures of you and I
From when both of us were oh so much younger
In each of them you are smiling at me
And in every one of them I am smiling back at you
I don't remember most of them I was quite very young
And for quite very different reasons I can imagine you would have a hard time remembering them as well
When I flip through the envelope I'm left sitting criss cross applesauce on a tore up linoleum floor
Staring at the scales of justice
Weighing the honest love of a drunk
Against the stoic rejection of the sober man you've become
And I am ashamed with how often I choose love

I am the keeper of this family's pain
Somebody has to
Someone has to admit it's real
One of us has to stare at the elephants in the room and see them
To know how each of us actually feels

Dear family
We are nothing more than four misfitted human beings
Tied together with tin can and twine telephones
By an astronomer, who in an effort to console himself,
Confused a congregation of lonely stars for a constellation
And eventually that is going to have to be enough
For each of us to love ourselves
To carry our own pain
I can not keep carrying all of this for each of you
I have my own pain
Which on most days is more than enough
I assure you
On most days
It is more than one man should

Touch me,
it doesn't matter where
and it doesnt matter how
I need to know I'm still alive
so someone touch me now
Shake my hand and say hello
or pat me on the back
kiss me on the cheek
that I may feel this sense I lack
slap my face and pull my hair
make me bleed I just don't care
dig your nails into my skin
so I can feed this need within
I've been numb for such a time
that even pain would be sublime
so touch me, touch me now
I don't care where, I don't care how

It was a cold, dark and difficult Wednesday
night;
I was walking through a lonely street beneath
the moonlight:
I can't stop thinking of her for a thousand times,
When I'm about to feel that her love is just a lie.

The tears were falling when we broke up only
yesterday,
Yet I still went to her house to tell the last
goodbye.
And I can't believe that our love has its end,
We loosened the tie and we just turned up on
pretending.

After a few minutes...

As I was standing one step apart from her door,
I found something yet I didn't mind it at all;
Still I walked forward and once opened her
house,
And there I saw something that really brought
me down.

I found her lying in front of me on her own
blood;
With a knife on her hand and a letter of her
love.
It was a sorrowful moment I could never ever
forget to see,
When that letter was telling that she killed
herself because of me.

I want you
to live forever
I ask you
to never die
I’m happy
only beside you
I plead you
to never ask why
I want our dreams
to embody
the Universal hallow light
I want our sorrows
to drown slowly
diluted in waters
when day calmly
turns into night
I want our hearts
to surrender
to charity, grace and delight
I want you
to always be happy
I beg you
to never cry.
2012