He stared at me like I was a painting.  He was a boy with eyes like creamed coffee and he could always find the big dipper.  When he spoke you listened even if it wasn’t often.  Lonely and lovely.  He spent a lot of time watching the stars, but often when he was tracing constellations with his piano fingers I was watching his shaky hands instead of the sky.  Piano fingers.  Once he played piano for me and I swear for a moment gravity had reversed and he returned to his real home in the stars.  He never slept, said he liked the way the air outside felt at night but I think he just couldn’t stand being in a home that wasn’t really a home anymore, he found more acceptance on the poorly lit asphalt than in the confines of his own house.  But soon the poorly lit roads and my stumbling words weren’t enough to fill the cemetery growing inside him anymore and he found his Mom’s painkillers.  Two little white pills wrapped in piano fingers to numb.  Soon three.  Four.  Five.  Six.  Too numb.  Blood on the floor.  The exhausted glow of streetlights was replaced with the exhausted glow of a hospital light.  I told the doctors if only you could see the stars I swear you would be okay and I kicked and screamed as they dragged me out.  Soon your creamed coffee eyes turned bitter.  You no longer traced constellations in the sky but scratched sadness in your skin.  You managed to get out of your imposter of a home that’s for sure.  People sent flowers, but they were the wrong kinds, hospital flowers that smelled like bleach and false hope.   I read you the card your math teacher sent; if you had been there you would have laughed.

ks