How are things going? I desperately want to ask
But now I remember how I called you that night crying and desperate
“Sorry dear, I have bigger priorities,” you mumbled nonchalantly in a tone that cut
I guess what was important to you was your short silver dress which you had to keep tugging at
And your layers of mascara which smeared in the heat and the sweat
Maybe you didn't feel like being responsible or putting up a fight
Didn't feel like talking in the pulsating strobe lights
Where you drank and danced and smoked,
Your hands around the masculine men with whom you hooked
I wonder if you still would have hung up if you knew I was crying for you.

And one year later you still haven’t changed
You’re out of school and awfully deranged
Lying at the side of the road in a drunken stupor,
Stinking of smoke and giggling hoarse
Your dress riding up mid-thigh and your heels strewn across the street
Ordering McDonald’s, planting fries in your friend’s garden throwing fits
Sitting in trolleys in supermarkets at 3 am in the morning screaming at the top of your lungs and I
Miss you I miss you I miss you I miss you.
If I ever saw you again I’d bury my face in your long raven hair and whisper how much you meant to me, once.
I’d stroke your whiter than white skin, touched and kissed by fifty other men
Bruised by the very people you call your friends
And I’d cry in your chest and tell you to come back
If all you’d do is swig down a bottle of beer
And not look my way, but cackle cruelly wailing dear
I would die more than a little inside

You stopped caring about anything that was supposed to matter,
Like being better than everyone and writing beautiful badass essays about saving the sharks
(And understanding everything I never understood about myself and laughing at the things I used to say and pinning my name with stars on your charts)
You forgot your dreams of wanting to travel and petting kangaroos, carving out something of yourself so they’d remember you for your passion
and loneliness is the only place at which you’re stationed.

Now all you’re doing is living monotonously, “the *** life” you call it, your dreams all burnt up in the intoxication of the hookah you pretend to love and dissolved in the alcohol you swallow now pulsing through your veins.
Come back.

“Can you state your emergency?”
“There’s been a lung collision.”

He’s stealing your breath, darling I can’t feel your lungs
What an aberration, forced to bleed the river of an emotion
You were never taught to feel growing up
I think nobody told you how to feel a colour so hard
Crimson on your neck, on your chest
But I cannot find a wound
Your breath feels like knives
But it’s funny, you’re dying

You’re trying to tell me something
It sounds like the kind of thing you would say right at sunset
Slurring your sevens like you have mints on your tongue
But you are only gasping for air

Marble gazes
Your eyes are lolling back
They are the same eyes that have cut through me
The same eyes I’ve always thought were beautiful
When you were sad

You are weak and you are failing
Completely unlike the times
You would walk in like a sandstorm
No less powerful than a serpent
Beautiful

Now you are trying to speak
“Feels like a fishbone dislodged in my lungs”
And you laugh
You are laughing and you are dying
And this night still feels like day

I tried scraping out the difference
Between guilt and self-loathe
But the answer only lies on the blade of this knife
Maybe I could tell you I don’t know what I did with it
The reason we are not sure from which wound
This blood is seeping from

It wasn't just a lung collision
It was the explosion of a galaxy in your chest
When your ribs bent and cracked
Now they are broken, dust
You are breathing in rust
But it does not matter because you are dying

In the distance there is the sound of sirens
They are coming and they might be far too late.

These road signs point to where you’d be
if you weren’t kneeled over in constant apology
you tell me sometimes you can hear
Aidan’s laughter at night,
as if someone’s strung them around
street lamps like fairy lights
your lungs collapse at the mention of his name
and your chest heaves with trembling shame
but you never told anyone else about the way
guilt straddles your shoulders every morning
as it leans towards his mother’s ears screaming
ears now turned deaf with grief

You tell me about the nights so dark
you can’t tell it apart from the hollow in your chest
most days you find it too hard to breathe
because the guilt hugs you so tight
it forces itself in your lungs
where these organs can’t contain
your feeling of sin
so you keel over and ***** by the road
where you last held Aidan

There are footprints in the mud
where he was last standing
but the imprints have hardened and Aidan has grown since
there was a much colder instance
when his sister flung a picture frame at you
so it shattered and you picked up a shard
to scratch out unforgivings in the mud by the road
where you watched your best friend die