We were friends again.
Just friends.
We sat, every Sunday morning,
(I work Saturdays)
in a diner.
You leaned over
the black hole
of your coffee,
pouring milk,
creating a galaxy
of bitter sugar.
You looked up to me,
who was just watching,
and said something,
probably nothing.
The comfortable space
between us smelled like
leather booths and orange juice
and small family restaurants and
scrambled eggs.
We got in your car
littered with what made
you, well, you.
I rode shotgun.

Oh son of beginners mistake
Son of pure unclean intention
Son of mothers midnight run to bar
Son of broken swan wing
Son of brokenness
Son of lack of sunlight
Son of ***** laundry

Boy of unknowing
Boy of drinking antifreeze
Boy of missing eyed crows
Boy of missing childhood
Boy of sorrow
Boy of stitches
Boy of afraid of manhood
Boy of afraid

Young God of suicide attempts
God of lying to himself that he ever wanted to die
God of lying to himself
God of lying
God of unholiness
God of shotgun misfire
God of unkempt basements
God of homeless dogs
God of death and life all at the same time
You ain't no God. You are a poser with wings and a capital letter to begin your wretched name.  

You won't be happy when you die, you are split between so many titles and you do not know which to choose. You are no one. No one. You are absolutely no one.

(Say, do you know the route to the nearest bar? I'm going to drink myself open, flesh off bone, apathetic skeleton, closest thing to happy. I'm going to drink myself away from you, this world, myself.)

"You never cared."
A bird bath in California empties.
"Oh yeah? Remember Christmas Eve?"
A mountain in Greece chews through itself.
"**** that, what color do I match yellow with? Do you even remember?"
Everyone in Boston swallows Vicodin until they throw up and die.
"You don't even spell your name right."
Quincy's streets wish the water dry.
"You have a family. Do you know what I'd ******* give for that?"
All the colleges in New York shoot themselves up and down.
"Your mother isn't human. Shut up."
A small town in Massachusetts washes all its white skin off.
"This leaving, this is for good isn't it?"
A forest is consumed by the songs of an imaginary bird.
"It isn't as hard as I imagined it to be."
Every door shuts, all at once. We all go deaf. Deaf. Deaf. Echo.
"Where's my happy ending? Huh?"
Echo.

10 miles. My current distance from the first time I noticed you cared. You were smoking ****. You blew the smoke away from my face. You knew I was allergic. You wanted to hold my lungs like cherry pits in the palms of your kitten's milk bowl hands, china dish. I wanted to thank you, I wanted to hand my heart over.

8 miles. The distance between me and you. The distance I tried to fill with footsteps, with begging rides from father, with bus, with FaceTime calls, with long texts. The distance that burned its way into my curtains, floated to my ceiling and stuck, burrowed its way into the night and sighed.

.8 miles. The distance between you and the person I replaced you with. The distance between a Red Dwarf and the moonlight that filled my heart up with Lindt chocolate and new yelling mother and darker messy hair and lower too loud laughs. I wash your favorite red plaid shirt from my hands and my Rolling Stones tank top, your cheek from mine, your jokes from my sheets.

0 miles. My current distance from the first time I noticed you stopped caring. I told you to stop flirting with addiction. You dragged your fingers up my arm, tied the tourniquet, choked out my blood, found the vein, breathed out hard, and then replaced me with all the drugs you could ever want and all the empty you could ever hold.

I guess some old habits never really die, only the people sick enough to try to stop them.

I watch you take your life out of the sunlight
And smash it down the sewer
Squeezing it through the pipelines
Smoking it out
I watch you take your future
And put cigarettes out on it
I watch you take a knife to my throat
Slice the most delicate skin and richest blood
And tell me
I didn't know everything
All along

I dig up the contents of your soul:
Scissor Sisters songs sung out of tune
3 stray hairs at a crime scene
An urn gathering dust on a sidewalk
Elvis Presley's shoes, worn down soles
An unflattering camouflage hat
The cries of the elderly, alone and alone again
Your mother, trying to define love
The oldest oak in Boston
The carcass of a deer, shot to the left of her heart

The part of my brain that absorbs every person I listen to  
(I stash your body in the microwave)
The hour of the night that I finally breathe
(Birds chirp the tune of your taped double homicide confession)
The perfect silence after a car crash
(Father smashes the last of your family portraits)
A lost dog with more fleas than teeth
(The birch in your grandmother's backyard calls you back to its roots)