Every second rings dully in my ears,
and somehow the passing minutes still feel so loud.
Sometimes I think I’m tired,
because my eyelids feel like they weigh more than the dissipating stash of pills I keep in the back of my underwear drawer,
and it requires a real conscious effort to keep them open;
but the only thing I can really feel is this horrible restlessness
leaving claw marks that vandalize the inside of my ribcage.
This thing in my chest - I can’t tune it out. It’s so much louder than everything else. I haven’t been able to hear my heartbeat in so long I
fear I may not have one anymore.
Maybe if you spent half as much time
listening as you do grabbing,
you would’ve noticed that my cold,
clammy, hands still haven’t stopped shaking.
I drowned in the lake that day, you know;
that second Wednesday in June,
and I waited for you to jump in and pull my body out of the water like you said you would
but the water is calm,
and I’m still waiting,
and maybe that’s why all these people talking to me
sound so far away
—distant;
like how things sound when you’re underwater and
the world above just keeps going without you.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
I have wept at the edge of the earth.
I have stared death in the face and turned away
when he offered me his fractured hand.
I dance at the top of the mountain,
wishing I could grab up the sunlight washing over my
battlefield face, and pour it in a bottle
to keep hidden away in the back of my closet.
I often stifle my better judgement and lay
control of myself at the feet of a captain who only means me harm; I jump ship into the hurricane waters
Which toss me and tumble me
and churn me around without letting me up for air.
You take your lungs for granted until there’s water inside of them. You take the light for granted until it’s dark
and cold
and you can’t tell which way leads back to the shore.
But I make it back every time.
My eyes adjust to the dark,
and I remember that I know how to swim.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.
The morning light streams through the basement window and
kisses my cheek so softly I can hardly feel it. With one hand I trace my fingers over the shattered bits of
outer space floating around in my blue-green veins,
and use the other to cover the bruises
and scrapes on the tops of my knees.
I don’t play the piano but I will spend the whole day trying
if it will make you smile.
And you can keep all your skeletons in my closet;
You’ll still look the same to me darling.
Here, take my last two dollars,
only one of us can get a ticket for this bus ride home
and I want it to be you.
I’m used to sleeping in alleys,
and you’ve never been without a pillow to lay your head on. Every time I will want it to be you.

Past all the white noise and thunder claps echoing
around in my mind, there’s a calm,
for I know that after my heart gives out,
whether it’s tomorrow, or when I’m old and shaky and gray;
whether it’s in a burning overturned car, or in a quiet unfamiliar hospital bed, even though it didn’t feel like it at times,

I know this all really was for something.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself
because after all the shipwrecks, salt stains, empty water bottles littering the carpet,
after all of it,
I still make it back to the shore
every time.

I’ll bet you never knew one place could be so deafening
and still so achingly silent at the same time.
Well now you do.
You don’t need to try and tell me about that feeling;
about how none of it makes sense,
about how
even though all your insides have evaporated into nothingness,
your body feels so painfully heavy that you fear
at any moment you may suddenly just sink through the floor.


I know how it makes your heart feel;
Standing in an unfamiliar place and
looking down at your cracked and calloused hands,
only to realize that it’s not actually unfamiliar at all.
The black of the night and the absence of street lights
tried their best to let you keep your ignorance,
your bliss, if you could call it that,
but they should know better. You can’t save anyone.


I know how the hair on the back of your neck stands up
and the frigid wind washes over you
and sinks it’s teeth straight into your bones.
I know how your lips start to tremble and
your knees quake like somebody
took the bone out and put jelly back in instead.
How your breath catches in your throat and you
look around the void with your frantic eyes, looking for anything to grab on to.


How the same frantic eyes turn dark and damp
once you realize that they’re all just past versions of you.
Pale and blue and faded,
Crying for something,
begging,
pleading.
Their mouths are moving,
and your mouth is moving but
no matter how hard you squeeze your eyes shut and scream,
no sound will come out.

Darling I must say that I’m

            quite surprised to see you here.

     Not that it’s unlike you to show up unannounced,
and track mud throughout my living room,
     even though I just had the carpet redone.
But how can I yell at you while
                  you’re sitting here
          coughing up bits and pieces of        broken piano keys and tainted silver?

I would ask how they got inside you in the first place,

but I won’t

because I don’t think I would very much like the answer.

But you’re here, on my couch,

making a mess of things just like I taught you how,

and the kettle hasn’t begun to scream yet,
         so let’s talk.
That is what you came here to do isn’t it?

Well maybe I don’t want to talk.
        Did you ever even consider that?
Maybe I don’t want to think about January anymore.
                After all these years,
      after all these frost bitten cheeks and lost sunglasses and nails bitten down to the quick,
maybe I want to get out of this car.


                                   I don’t,
but I can’t very well tell you that now can I?
No, I can’t.

Don’t worry about the bruises on the wall or the shadow in the corner.
      You’re not.
You’re not even looking.

How are you?
Fine.
Nice weather we’ve been having.

     Yeah maybe,
except the air is always so cold that there’s ice in my lungs and it
        never stops being Tuesday.
Don’t just look at me, say something. Or if you won’t, then at least  build a fire.
           No, I’ll do it.
Go lay down,
there’s a space in my bed next to Nostalgia that’s
      probably still warm.
            Just throw the book on the floor.
I can put it away if it means you’ll stay awhile.

Turn the heat down, turn the lights off
                  this is all just temporary.
      We don’t have to talk about the car crash or the window or what’s buried in that yard.
      Focus only on my skin now.
We can think about that night in the pool later,
         when you’ve gone home again and turned up the music so loud          that you can’t hear the gunshots.

I have to say that I’m quite
               disappointed,
      and slightly offended by your
lack of attention to detail.
Don’t you remember
     when you were eight years old,
             all filled with soda pop and sidewalk chalk,

and you won that fish at the state fair for something silly
          like knocking over three milk bottles stacked on each other with
    four tries and a baseball.

Who the hell needs four tries for that?

But you won the fish and made it a home
           in a small glass bowl set on top            
                               of your nightstand.

Four days later while you were at school your mom discovered it floating belly up,
          flushed it down the toilet and rushed out of the house
      coming back twenty minutes later     with a fish similar enough to keep you from noticing
          that anything had changed at all.


Oh well,
     I’ll keep that in it’s wooden box at the back of my closet,
Let you keep your ignorance.
Let you keep your bliss.
    And I will sit quietly in the backseat
                   of your car while you drive,
and watch all the different girls
   get in and out of the passenger seat.

But I will never buckle my seatbelt,
     and always keep the door unlocked

just to see if it will scare you enough to turn around.

My insides have evolved into a dry and barren desert.
At one point.
long ago,
they felt like a square of sidewalk during a particularly heavy rain;
being beaten down on by the drops of water
and the feet of people running to get inside.
Wet and palpable.
But now I'm just filled with miles and miles of this harshly arid sand
and a dry, scorching air that often feels like it's suffocating me.
It's a terribly hopeless place to be.
An absence of all feeling except an uncomfortable dissatisfaction with life
and nothing to grab hold of.

She was everything. She was just this presence - this force that felt so much larger than anything else you’d ever experience in this dreary life. She was her own species; too magnificent to be meek, mortal humans like the rest of us. She hadn’t been made for this earth, and it must’ve been by some cosmic mishap that anybody ever even got the chance to encounter her. There was both an unyielding passion and an aching discontentment for life coursing through her. She would look you straight in the face with this sort of empathy that wrapped some feeling of importance and worth around you so softly that it paralyzed you. She had a deep and unwavering fascination with people. She wanted to know them. She wanted to know what touched them in ways that made their chests feel tighter because their hearts swelled up with bliss. She wanted to know what made them collapse onto the bathroom floor and sob so hard that it stopped their breathing. She wanted to what made them feel. And perhaps this was because she had been born with an awful, aching loneliness that hung in her chest. She rarely ever let anyone close enough to touch her, but even when she did, it was as if there was this sort of magnetic field lining her insides that wouldn’t allow anything to reach through. There had been a terrible war raging inside her for as long as she could remember. And she was often in pain. At times, she was gripped with such an intense and piercing sadness that each beat of her heart felt like a knife being twisted further and further into her stomach. The kind of agony that blocks out everything else. And during these times, she wanted to die. Other times, she was subjected to an absence of any feeling at all. Her mother often walked in on her sitting cross-legged on her floor, staring at the small chip in the blue paint on her bedroom wall. No matter how hard she tried, she wasn’t even able to remember what caring about anything felt like. She was overtaken by an emptiness that was incapable of being filled. She was a contradiction of a girl; the softest ray of light marbled with veins of dangerously black abyss. She was not designed for survival, but she sure as hell was designed for something. She lived brighter, harder. She knew that the demons swimming around inside her made it so that loneliness would be all she ever ended up at. No one else would ever experience the state of life she resided in; and while she felt comfort in knowing that nobody else had to feel the way she did, that sort of isolation is a slow and inescapable type of suffocation. And so she lived. She was a shooting star, moving so fast that all anybody else could do was stand in awe and watch. Watch till she burned up. Watch till her breath ran out. And then, one day, there was nothing. Our star had burned out, and the world felt so hopelessly dark. People still went about their lives; going to work, going to school, going to the grocery store and forgetting to buy milk; and people remembered her and people forgot her, and some days I just have a hard time with it all. She was everything, you know? And I guess I just wish you could save people.

It's heavy tonight and every movement feels like a paper cut.
I thought I might be getting a cold but I just keep coughing up broken piano keys. It’d be no use going to the doctor, he’d probably just ask me something sharp like when the last time i felt loved was, or if i still pulled the heads off daisies like i started doing after you left. Jesus I wish you had left. You’re gone but you’re ******* everywhere. Does it get hard to breathe for you too? I’ve realized that missing you comes in two different forms. One is wild. Frantic. The kind that makes me gasp for air and rock back and forth hugging my knees. My mothers seen it enough now that it no longer concerns her. It’s desperate. It’s hysterical. It’s us. But the other is quiet. The other is breathing so steadily that you can hear the absolute silence in my ribcage. God that kind of quiet aches. It just aches and all you can feel is the absence of everything. Of anything. Of you. Of us. There’s never a clean break is there? You can never lose someone and not have jagged edges cutting into your sides every time you try to look at the moon or an old t-shirt or your favorite mug with a chip in the handle. I don’t know why I keep shouting at the sky like there’s a God up there, or like he’d be listening to me even if there was. I guess all I’ve learned from all of this is that sometimes love is just sitting at a bus stop but waving by every one that stops. And it tastes a lot like drinking cough syrup when you’re not even sick.

And that’s us.