bring everything i love just within reach
joy with a noose tied around it
and smiles
have become insufficient
because only when we've cut them down
and weighed them against others'
do we find solace in knowing
at least i'm doing something right;
at least i'm normal

of all the people standing in the same room
staring blankly at each other
i seemed to struggle the most
with reconciling words on screens
and human interaction
which has become so alien to us
i almost forgot how to reach out to you

this boy that i liked
that i had invested oxygen and beautiful poems in
had given me fleeting glances and midnight inklings of loneliness
embedded his own pain in the corners of my smile to carry
i let him
because he told me he loved my smile
but it was never enough that i only wept silently
in the privacy of my room

because even there
he'd seemed to find a way in
through my screen
he'd trace every jagged word
and every dark thought
back to me and i'd watch him break me
over and over
paralyzed with the fear that he'd stop loving me
because i wasn't there to make him see through me

i wonder how differently i could write our story
if we weren't so separated
two
different
distant beings
i suppose i was able to see how little you cared
to have never picked up the phone
and ask me how i was doing.