it's been nearly three years.
i hate myself when i remember because it means i forgot.
and i swore i wouldn't.

knowing never made it any easier.
the moment you texted me, words messy with tears that fell on the other side of a screen.
a terrible, quiet voice in me spoke its name already.

i never knew why, of our little group, you told me. they knew you better.
i don't even know what you look like.
maybe you're still out there after all.
i would never forgive you.

you told me about the boys.
about the names they spat as they held you down.
you told me how the poison dripped into your ears to rot you from the inside out.
he said you felt like a girl.
i sat. i listened. and i spent the rest of the night retching into the toilet until my lungs hurt.

i spent an hour looking up animal facts when you told me you wanted to be distracted.
i didn't put my phone on silent for three months in case you needed me.
i wouldn't chase you if you disappeared because you said you needed space.

but it had been three months and i wake up to a message from someone else inside your username.
who told me because i was the only one that had asked where you were.
i missed you by a few weeks.

i spared the details.
your friend told me about your parents, and how they cried.
because they didn't know what you said to me until they searched your phone.
before that, he said, they couldn't understand at all.
until they did.

all my useless miles away, i know there was nothing i could do.
but i knew it was coming
and knowing never makes it easier.

and i'm an adult now, in name if nothing else,
lying awake at night still crying for a fourteen-year-old boy who hasn't finished rotting yet.
from the inside out.