we laid on the sand and we laughed as he pondered the cosmos above and I pondered the cosmos streaming through his veins. we talked about the boy he knew and the boy I know and we cried as we wondered why life was so unfair to the ones that gave it the most. we cried at the waves and we stomped on the sand and we cursed at the gods and the stars and the sun and the moon and anything else that we could put the blame of our recklessness on and we wished the worst and the best and the worst for all of the people that existed more than we.
he cried for the boy that lost his voice in the fight and the parts of himself that he lost every night after that. he could barely stand upright. and in a weary, cracking, voice, I looked up at him and asked, “are we ever going to go back to who we were?” and for the first time in all of documented and undocumented history, my collection of stardust, my religion of a boy turned cadaver, my flora and hellfire and fauna didn’t know. so we laid there, hand in hand, head in hell, pondering the cosmos. and we cried some more. we hypothesized as to why there were people starving to death and why humans killed humans in the name of God and why all the while we were sitting here in our little corner of the world crying over everything and everyone that had ever hurt us. but we shrugged it off. tonight was for the stars in his veins and in my eyes and in the sky. tonight was for crying for the boy who lost his voice in the fight. tonight was for mourning the parts of him that he lost every night after that and the parts of myself lost every midnight I watched him cry and lull himself into an ill fated sleep. the world is big. and the sand was so heavy and the water from the atlantic so amorphous and the dark sky so dulcet that I had forgotten about the trials and tribulations. but I snapped back as I heard his voice oscillate with every breath like my own berceuse. secretly, i loved this. but silently I wished for me and him to dissolve into our tears and up into the atmosphere, so the month of june and i would never have to deal with how cruel the world is ever again.

and just like that my life was a waiting game. everything felt like a precursor to what was supposed to happen. and what was supposed to happen never did.

... and just like that, my words disintegrated into sand, and were thrown relentlessly against the shore by a sea of newer ones.

as I laid down in the dim corner of the nurses office at 15, heating pad clutched and secured on my stomach by all my limbs, I had thought about how badly I wished for this flame to engulf me and everything in my wake. life wasn't the hellscape I had wished for.

he’s resting his head on my shoulder and I don’t know how to ******* breathe. this motion said so much, I think. cause yeah, I had rested my head on his shoulder hundreds of times and I had burrowed my head into his neck and sat on his lap and slept on his chest. but in this taxi, going down and down 43rd, 42nd, 41st it was different. his eyes were tired. the lights outside illuminated the right side of his face and reminded me that there was a world that existed outside of the backseat of this taxi cab. it felt like time had froze just for the two of us, like no human interaction had ever been as significant as this and the taxi driver, the people on the sidewalks outside, the city of new york, the entire universe had to stop to see this. he was fading in and out of a minute sleep and we equally reeked of the 6 train and pistachio brulee and I was so tired and so dazed that in that moment I told myself that I loved him. no doubt. I didn’t even have to think about it. the love was this low hum that always followed you everywhere. it was the kind that sometimes got annoying and left you wondering where the hell it even came from. but it was also the kind that lulled you to sleep at night and when it needed to, it picked and prodded at you to remind you it was still there. -sk

to both me and the universe he seemed ubiquitous.  i could never tell if that was a good thing.

staring at him is like staring at the sun