How holy the night looks, dressed in its crushed velvet gown, folding in all the delicate and beautiful places.

I tuck my grief into bed beside me and as I feel it's cold heat, its head careening onto my shoulder, I wish I could have your thin fingers lapping over my wrist, your delicate and blue beauty settling into the space next to me, left by my own two careless eyes. I want to feel your body curled up beside mine, safe and righteous in its temple of quilts and comforters, safely lullabied by a 10 episode Netflix binge, popcorn strewn on the carpet like exploded snowflakes from when I tried to throw it in your mouth, missing because I shook with butterfly laughter.

I want to take your sadness and whisper it to a memory. I want to kiss the fading and cooling parts of the sun back to life. I want to taste what every word you've ever spoken sounds like, feels like, lips on biography on lips on pearl's surface. I want to hold your heart like the wildly beating wings of a tiny bird. I want to love you so much, so beautifully, so genuinely, so big and wide and lovely as the ocean, so that love is spoken back into existence.

Dearest Unreal and Unforgiving God,

It's three weeks to the day an old friend killed himself and I'm counting the ways I've changed.

My world is still upside down, even though I've stopped crying now I can't stop reimagining life in ways to make it tender again.

I swear, I've held my hand out to everyone I've ever wanted to and it's not enough. I can still feel myself falling so incredibly short.

How do you explain to someone how softly you felt for them while they shivered in your arms, how all their scars seemed to run through your heart, tugging your sleeve towards the direction of "I want to love you more and more until you love yourself."? How do you tell them you wanted to rewrite every suicide note, resign it with "never mind"? I can't began to find the words for "I want you to be happy so bad it keeps me up at night."

And hey God, would it **** you to make a miracle happen every once in a while?

I have wanted to spread the incredible, bursting compassion I felt when he died, that terrible, uncontainable empathy, but how is it that words fall short on everyone except I'm sorry?

I'm trying to touch lives in a way that November 27 will again just be a date. I'm trying to make it all right. I'm trying to be the light that could've lit up the dark and made the world turn again.

As you were taking your last breath I hope you felt this.

Hey kid, you've been dead a few weeks and I'd just like to say hello. The ground has its first December coat of fragile snow over your dead body and I know you can't feel the cold but I'll tell you right now, I can see my frozen toes, just barely move them, breathe up into the sky, Id be lying if I said I still cry every day. But, I'm lying to myself if I said that I'm not trying to take back your pain every day in a way that won't make your heart start beating again.

I wonder if those butterflies ever drank up the nectar from your blood, probed their soft tongues into the velvet of your cuts, those razor blade ribbons, oh holy romantic, how you bleed like Mozart and bleed like ballads of classic rock stars, how they whip your face with sour sweat and drugs and drugs and drugs until you find yourself half asleep, brain swept under the rug.

Did you know only 1.5% of drug overdose related suicide attempts are successful? Beautiful blonde martyr for an ugly catholic high school in an ugly state in the ugliest of its hearts, how does it feel to be 1 in 100? How does it feel to be a rarity, carbon pressed into diamond? How does it feel to be cry for a week, left in the grass to roll like waves, buried without a name and a face and a grave?

In the latest of solemn sleep deprived nights I press my ear to the chest of the 100th depressed boy I come across and don't feel Vicodin climbing up his arteries, don't feel Klonopin, OxyContin, Ibuprofen. I can't seem to find the one, who knows, maybe you were it and all my efforts really were wasted. All those nights I've stayed up late did nothing. All those knives I stole, all that blood I wiped away with t-shirt sleeves, all the blankets I've put around stupid shaking shoulders, all the bittersweet will this be the last time your skin is this warm hugs, God did they mean nothing at all?

I lock my jaw into a permanent silence, buy back time by putting my money where your knife is. I take bets on when someone will die next. I read the label on every bottle of Xanax. I roll over in my bed again and again, and try to put you to rest again.

Amen.

I wrap my head around
the softness I feel for the
curve of your shoulders
covered by a blanket-
my comforter.
I think of your thin fingers
around a mug
of hot chocolate.
You're humming to the tune
of something we both recognize.
Snow falls like angel wing feathers,
drifting light to the earth
like I always imagined it.
Just like I always imagined it.

Stay in bed
Sometimes turning to my right
Until I close my eyes

I feel my face turn moonlight silvering with tears, midnight. You're off to Boston, he's off to sleep, I'm off to the last time I remember seeing my dead old friend's face, his veiny arms, my unknowing.

I can feel my heart settle into a place in my chest, not occupied for the better part of a week. I've been distracted, making choices that will probably **** me in a month's time.

Cause when I came home
I’d lost thirty something pounds

I think of your little nose, scarred legs, tiny laughter shaking your tiny body on this tiny Earth in this tiny space we exist in.

The space we exist in. I think of how small of a box I am contained to. My fingertips will never reach further than I can see.

And I won’t be nice to anyone
Because I don’t see why I should
I don’t see the point

No amount of tears will bring him back, that blood was stilled a long time ago. No amount of my effort matters anything because you're too many months ahead of me, too many heartbeats away, too many lives into it.

I just pick up and drop people like peaches- bruised, unholy sweetness, ripe. I bite my own tongue until it is bubble gum. I want to be a better person.

I've been working on it. I think you're getting me there, somehow, someway.

I won’t, I won't get clean
For the rest of my life
I won’t be nice

Playing my cards wrong like
Jim Morrison prom night bath,
lavender and drug fixings,
we all just hope I went
missing.

Sorry I only love you
until I wake up in the
morning.
I'm on and off like
sunrise sunset.

My mind is stuffed
in a box
in the attic.
I'm a heartbreak
addict.
Don't ever let me heal.

Let's see how pretty those blue eyes can

(Stop. Wait. Feel for your heartbeat. Press your hands to the warmth of your cheeks, feel them soften with the perfection of your smile. Run your hands through your hair. You're alive.)

be. Be what you see in the sun, warm and shining and all seeing and all loving. Stop lamenting for just a

(She has moved on and on and on to more and more and more and it is still less than you.)

minute. In a minute the blood from your wrist will start to look like her hair, waves tapering into split ends, feathering. Don't panic yet it's

(Sweetheart, please don't cry. I can feel it across the **** carpet surface of my tired heart. I'm aching to soothe whatever shakes you.)

not over.