When I saw him, it wasn’t like walking into a library that would be torn down exactly two years later; it was exactly like losing my breath and my mind in the same way, at the same time. Something changed that day, I mean, I didn’t write poetry until I met him, and I wasn’t good at it until i lost him.

The left over pieces of my childhood where stuck to me like dried flower petals between the dog-eared pages of a book, “How many copies of Alice in wonderland? Read ten times, and still not enough. I even learned to read with my eyes closed.” And if I were actually blind, I would still know that he was beautiful.

I listened to songs about falling apart, and loving him felt like winter. Like my lungs were struggling in the frost bitten air, and when he said, “I have this feeling,” feelings being shared, like we where the only two people there, in this room with the sun shining in my eyes and on my face, not that I should even believe him,”I like you,” It felt like falling. Tumbling. Tumbling down the rabbit hole. If I went back in time, I might not have read Romeo and Juliet, I didn't think you could die for love, but maybe for a cigarette.

We got along because I can’t be friends with anyone who isn't already an artist. There is something particular about the way they live, I thought he might know how to fix me. He’s actually just like me, only void of the embarrassment. I hold myself to such low standards, everyone can walk all over me. Life, already upside down, inside out. “Eat me drink me,” a soundtrack. Pain, he taught me, happens for a reason, and the reason I am alive is because I am worth so much more. Books were only conditioning, and he was the door. He did tell me it would take four years, and every day of it we could share. But he lied, because it took five, and for the rest of my life, he wasn't there.