The bullet cracks your teeth, your tongue burns against
the hot metal, cooled down by detached touches and
mute denial. I have never felt such pain as when you painted
my cheeks with your fingertips. The blood still stains your hands.

I hear autumn calling me and I wish to go her way, however
though miles away your hands still hold my waist, asking me
to stay. My mother always said the devil was near.
I never expected him to have such blue eyes.

No amount of bourbon could erase the scars your
lips left behind. No matter how many words pile
on top of each other, your voice remains clear.
And even when I sunk into my old habit, he wasn’t you.

September has always been kind to me.
But this year seems so cold. The miles stretch
me thin. I feel myself drowning, they are saying I can only save myself.
But I still find myself here, drinking the sea.

self-isolation
My mum tells me to leave the house more often and it’s not that I don’t want to it’s just that I can’t because the thought of only doing so makes my knees go weak but she keeps telling me to “just” meet up with friends.

2. not finding joy in what used to make you happy
It’s not that I don’t make plans with friends, because I do, it’s just that I don’t want to because I know that, as soon as I’m out doing things that used to make me happy and are supposed to still make me happy, I will have to pretend that I am, in fact, happy.
And it is exhausting.

3. insomnia
You tell me to sleep more because I look tired as if I am not aware of the bags under my eyes. You do not realise that they feel even worse than they look. You do not know that I am in bed early every single night because I do feel tired I just can’t sleep. Even though I am tired and my body is tired, my brain never is and I have tried reading and taking walks in the middle of the night and listing and counting sheep and insecurities and defeat and crushed wishes and possible ways to die.

4. thinking of death as “nothing big”
What scares most people is what intrigues me. I often find myself considering crossing the road right when a car rushes by or simply jumping out the window when I find myself in high buildings. It’s not that I want to die, it’s more that I am fascinated by how easy it is, opposed to everything else in life.

5. things that are supposed to be easy aren’t so easy any more
The biggest one is getting out of bed, I believe.
I have learned to put my alarm fifteen minutes earlier to let my brain and body accustom to the idea of having to face things that I don’t even know are going to happen. The fear of having to face the unknown is like a constant winter, freezing my throat shut and making breathing a whole lot more difficult than it is supposed to be.

6. being very aware of your breathing and heartbeat**
I never noticed how natural breathing was until I started to have trouble doing so. Now it just feels as though my lungs and my heart are in a constant fight to decipher which is the strongest which leaves me in a constant battle of having to focus on my breathing whilst my heart is making me feel as though someone is repeatedly punching me from the inside.
I know none of it makes sense and even if I try to explain it all to you, you will still tell me you don’t understand. But frankly, neither do I.

Being so aware of my breathing and heartbeat also makes me aware of the fact that they are still going, and that is really the only thing that matters in the end.
They are still going.

There is no whiskey in his room tonight...

Instead,
There is a half-empty glass of-
Rock shandy, Pepsi-cola, Dr.Pepper,
Or something black.
Something minuscule,
even though he has not sipped from it.
He has not looked at it- his tongue
Was only dry for two minutes before he
Locked the door.
For the only presence that made it hard for him to swallow
Was in the form of something that he was still trying to release...
at 2AM.
Release at 2AM.
There is a typewriter in front of him and he is feeling as permeable as
The glass that is sitting next to it.
'as permeable if it had a closed lid made up out of carbon' he thinks.
'Closed lid', 'Carbon',
'Closed lid'
He does not know what to type.
As distance diminished it's existence throughout the years,
He began to realize that Letters were starting to transform themselves
Into Diary-Entries and vice-versa.
The art of belittling seclusion through the method of fictionalizing himself
Was turning more into a hobby than an art and
he did not know what to do except to accept it as a tragedy
That nobody else needed to know about.
"Tragedy:" he types.
"I don't know how to forget about you."
'And etcetera,' he thinks.
In his minds eye he sees a girl in a school far away.
She's holding a camera and a textbook and a picture of a boy
That isn't him.
She's walking into her new life and one day she will go a week without
Thinking about how it feels to know interest and feel it shared
from someone who thought it never existed.
One day she will go a week without thinking about the boy who stared at empty pages
And wrote letters about bitter meals that his tongue thought could never be tasted.
One day she will go a week with just the thought of how glamorous a life spent alone is...
Before she meets someone there...
Who will make her taste something that is less bitter than him himself.
'I hope that's where my story ends.' He thinks.
And then imagines himself embedded into
Dark bitter things.
(Tobacco, caffeine, dark chocolate.)
He sighs and stares at the words he has already typed.
He can imagine these bitter things spilling into his glass and changing its taste with each
little drop.
"You were dead to me before you even walked out of the door..." He decides,
And puts it onto the paper.
He lifts the glass and takes a sip and then puts it back down again.
'One day she will go a week without thinking about me..."  He thinks.
Release at 2AM.