These words are made of only 26 ******* letters that are just so full of blank spaces and white surroundings and that doesn’t compare to the way your eyes sparkle and your hands dance when you speak and the way your back curves and the goose bumps that covered your body when we sat on a fire escape smoking at 5 am and watching the world wake up. These words are too empty and dulled down by white nothingness for me to describe the way you breathe color and energy or the way your mind rotates around itself in the most beautiful way I’ve ever seen.

I’ve heard that ‘he’s just a boy get over him’ and I’ve heard that there are ‘plenty of fish in the sea’ but it feels like whenever I go to grab another fish I find you, and here I am grasping your fish carcass in my hand and then I fall into the ocean and I’m afraid of the ocean I can’t remember how to swim I can’t remember anything all I remember is the way your skin felt against mine and the way you breathed my name and promised forever but I guess that was a lie because here I am holding your dead fish carcass and drowning in an abyss of ‘other fish in the sea’ and I want to forget it all but part of me is only alive because of those memories of the way your hair fell or how you smelt of stale cigarettes and bitter coffee and maybe I don’t want another fish maybe I want your carcass to grow skin and all the anatomy I can’t even pretend to understand and I want you to breathe my name but instead you left me for a universe I don’t even know exists. So here I am choking on your name for the rest of my life.

You used to tell me how much you loved me while you smoked your ******* cigarette illuminated by the moon and then you’d flick the filter and toss it away and it’s taken me until now to realize that I was just one cigarette in a pack of 20 to you and you let me burn out once you were done and then you just tossed me away.

I remember how your voice sounded in contrast to the radio and how you would hum along to Somewhere Over The Rainbow while you drove and I remember the ******* way you swerved away from a dead raccoon on the street and how your hand got sweaty in mine when you almost missed the sharp turn and I hate remembering and I just want to forget but I can’t. Now you’ve swerved away from me and left me as a dead carcass and I want to reach down my esophagus and pull out my heart but I can’t do that and I hate that you just don’t care and I want to forget you and I want to forget your smell and I just want to ******* forget everything. I don’t want to live like this. I can’t live like this.

It smells like liquor on the streets you used to kiss me on at 3 am in our drunken shenanigans. The times we snuck out to adventure in the woods and carved our names into trees bigger than we could fathom. When did ‘I love you’ turn around to mean ‘When it’s convenient’ and when did you free your hand from the tangled knots in my hair and when did you stop kissing me at 3 am with the taste of ***** stained to our tongues.

The first time you told me why you don’t talk to your parents we were in your car driving to nowhere at one in the morning. Your dad was angry and your mom was empty. Your hand was shaking and sweating in mine and if we were holding on any tighter our fingers would have broken. My heart was beating ***** and when you swerved the car to avoid a raccoon we came seconds away from hitting the truck that was coming at us. I couldn’t take my eyes off the silhouette of your face in the light of the moon. I watched the curve of your lips as you spoke of the pain of watching your mother fill her emptiness with gallons of *****, and I saw a single tear streak down your face, you refused to release my hand so it dropped onto your lap. We stopped at the base of a mountain and climbed through trees making our own trails until we reached the top. We ****** as the sun came up and I had never felt more at home than when you wrapped me in your arms.

we used to lay together at the top of a hill stating at the stars and watching planes fly over is. you traced constellations on my skin and knotted flowers into my hair. your touch was lightning and your voice was a razorblade cutting through the still air. you lit a match off my tongue for your cigarette and the smoke was a lethal gas that made my head spin. I saw fireflies dancing when I closed my eyes and I tried to reach out to catch just one for you but my hands were made of knives and the fireflies turned into scorpions and they were stabbing into my bones and I was bleeding gasoline mixed with glitter but you were frozen in a dream and your blood was ice and you couldn't hear me spitting your name into the poisoned air. the clouds were black and red flares were peeking out at me whispering raspy nothing's and my blood was on fire pouring out of the holes the scorpions left me with and the grass was a bed of needles pushing into my back and that's the last thing I remember before waking up in a hospital after they pumped the venom from my stomach.