At first I didn't believe you were gone
Up until that point death was
about as fictional as once upon
a time
And no one ever actually said the word
Dead
Like it was too hot
not spicy hot

but burning

singeing your lips as you spoke
and if you let it sit there too long
you'd start to think about the smoke
that clouded the impossible
You can't be dead
I was just with you last night
armed with a bottle in my right
hand while my left clutched a bottle of pills
and I watched your lips spill the words
You have so much to live for

And people just look at me
expecting to spout some ******* metaphor
about how death is less like the sunshine
and more like the storm that engulfs you long before you no longer have a pulse

Your mother asked me if you seemed suicidal
And as she screamed when she last saw you
I couldn't bring myself to go about our recital
Where I would shake my head and say
None of this was your fault
But as I looked in the eyes of a mother
who was no longer a mother
I couldn't bring myself to lie

And so I let the silence fill the air like
a thousand butterflies
pressing every square inch of atmosphere
making us all acutely aware about how unfair
it was that we were breathing
And you weren't

I tried not to think about
how much it must have hurt
when your car collapsed in on you
as you made no attempts to skirt
around the blue semi truck
that had no time to try and stop
I bet he couldn't even manage the word
**** before he died
You killed him, too

And I wondered if that was
something that ever occurred to you
                     that you were leaving more
corpses in your wake in your last successful
attempt to take your own life
That your mother hasn't stopped sobbing
and your father hasn't quit asking if there
could have been any stopping you
But I know the truth is
you didn't want us to

I said your name today, out loud
Which is something I haven't been able to
bring myself to do since I found
myself screaming it among the crowd
of people along the highway
They said you died instantly
That nothing prolonged
your suffering and I wondered how
they could have known that

Because they didn't know

that you had been dying all along