i’ve been thinking about how little everything actually matters and how i am the cause of all the problems in the world. i laid next to my backpack and pretended i was at the center of a crime scene, as i dumped the contents of my bag out and laid them in a straight line like a criminal investigator. every receipt postcard camera and film. i read all the postcards and realized how fake every apology  or thank you or i miss you i ever written has been. and the only one i had meant was yet to be written. i needed to find a way to make my feelings sound realer than the fake ones and the i do not know any other ways to say “i love you” other than i wish you were here and so on. i purposely ignored you so i could lay down and pretend you were holding me. it felt so real and i could not hear anything and i forgot i was in the middle of a beach and you were in your friends basement getting high and that even though you were closer to me than you usually were, i could not see you. i realized that i would continue to feel this way for months and the distance between us would continue to grow until a miracle brought you to me or me to you & how wishful it was to think someone like you would wait for someone like me as i felt myself grow younger and i did not know if i would ever see you again. i cried when i realized the second time we met may have been the last & that i had known you longer than anyone i had ever loved & realized if you let go, it would hurt more than ever. i pretended we stopped talking forever when my phone died & wrote the number, one thousand eight hundred and eighteen on my arm. i am running out of poetic ways to say i miss laughing with you in a van and now when i think of green eyes i think of yours and not hers, and even though the drugs made your face look really different- i still thought you were really beautiful but i didn’t have the courage to say it & i was shivering or how i made a list of things i should’ve told you or how i had wished i had held your hand but it would make this all hurt even more. how even meeting you for less than twenty four hours with many awkward silences still managed to feel right and how our eyes said everything our mouths wouldn’t. the sky shifted and became beautiful intricate patterns i thought i would never see before, and i tried to think of ways i could live in that moment forever, but somehow fell short. when we left, i wanted so badly to turn the car around, thinking somehow i would be able to see the patterns again.