I cried myself to the shower last night.

I used boy shampoo over the arms that I’ve been scratching for hour, four hours spent trying to get the blood I hated so much to come up and sit on my skin like it was their art gallery, hanging on for display.

It never came.

I run water over me burning tears into camouflage,the words of an empty life stung to my head as if the thoughts branded it here on me permanently.

I’ve had nights like this before.

Nights where I put on the loosest pajamas I could find, the ones with ESPN written written as read as the books on my old library shelf. The ones I took when my brother went to work and left me by myself, the ones that made me feel manly, even if I didn’t look like a man.

I wouldn’t put a shirt on.

My chest was bare, not in the way I wanted, but I couldn’t tear off my breast and give them to a girl who wasn’t born with them, I’d just have to stare till my stomach growled and tears streamed down my face, fears of a life unloved and unlived made me put on a loose shirt and tell myself I wasn’t hungry, so instead I thought of you.

You, with your crooked smile when you see me at your doorstep with the sun’s colors draped in a bouquet. I show up in a fox shirt, the one I call lucky, and you count each and every one and you point out how dorky I am.

You, with your back on the mattress of the cheapest apartment we could find, reading love letters I’ve written to your baby sister over the phone, telling her of all my love in the distance of thousands of miles. I try to pretend I can’t hear you from the kitchen as I make you tea, the lemon juice coating it bronze with the color of its juice, your vase holds out bright sprouts of happiness as a centerpiece.


Daisies plague my mind on nights like these. They’re scattered at your funeral & my own on our graves, at the fifty yard mark.

“We’ve been rolling together since we were 25.”

Nights like these remind me that my masterpiece is so far, even if the dasies are so close, so near.