1 here’s to the boy who i unknowingly married when i was a kindergartner only for him to unknowingly divorce me inside a moving train thirteen years later
2 here’s to the boy whose once-euphoric image instantly floated away from me as the heavy riffs of an underrated rock band ignited a crowd surf that only moved from east to west
3 here’s to the boy who had the courage to ask me why i was good at spelling but never had the guts to ask me if I liked him back
4 here’s to the boy whose memories never ceased to haunt me. from the questions about cigarettes to the questions about bra sizes, from the diary entries to serial poems, from us not happening to us never happening.
5 here’s to the boy who treated me as an eyepiece when all i ever wanted was to be his favorite specimen
6 here’s to the boy who i turned into a melancholic four-chord song when he proved to me that white roses and love letters don’t work well as bribes
7 here’s to the boy who decided to sum up three years of our one-sided, on-off relationship by responding “when?” the night i finally had the sanity to tell him, “don’t cry. i loved you so much.”
8 here’s to the boy whose hand i held for it was about to be sliced thin by my razor-edged ribs
9 here’s to the boy who i wish i met in another Earth
10 here’s to the boy who hugged me backstage and threw tomatoes at me frontstage
11 here’s to the boy who is two-dimensional, but is a million times human than the people i know
12 here’s to the boy who plucked the right strings when i began humming an unfamiliar tune
13 here’s to the boy who collects broken hearts for his own pleasure, but was very disappointed when he wasn’t able to break mine
14 here’s to the boy who left me alone on a boat so he could swim his way towards a luxury cruise ship
15 here’s to the boy who knows too much about me but too little about her
16 here’s to the boy whose sighs inflated my lungs, and who later on taught me how to build sandcastles out of his cigarette ashes so he could eventually blow them down with his exhales. (not because he likes to destroy what i’ve built, but because he always enjoyed the sight of me basking in the powdery white-gray ruins)
17 here’s to the boy who convinced me why i shouldn’t procreate
18 here’s to the boy whose brain i wanted to unspool so i could crochet a beanie out of his to-die-for fibers
19 here’s to the boy whose outward boffs made me wish he was my creator, and whose own silence drowned out his pulse last September
20 here’s to the boy who made me wish i had a ****, bigger than his, so i could show him more ways to squander masculinity
21 here’s to the boy who told all his stories to me, and who hated math so much but was better at it than me
22 here’s to the boy who i broke off midsentence when he thought Richard Linklater was directing both of our lives
23 here’s to the boy who lavished me with his words and inspired me to come up with this spin-off
24 here’s to the boy who was vindictive enough he didn’t entertain the thought of depriving me of a body
25 here’s to the boy who thought he had a slot on this poem