What Came For Me.

This is not art.
These are not pretty words, even when they are.
I have not written something. 
I have ripped off a chunk and handed it to you. 
Do with it what you please.
Please.

She begins in shadow. The corner smells of dust and old radiator, a smell she learns 
means morning. Each day the light seeps across the wall in a slow, golden crawl, and with it 
comes the low, steady tremor, the woman’s voice, moving through wood and air, vibrating her 
spun silk.  

The frame is her gift. Eight lines anchored where the sound is fullest. She feels it hum 
when the woman laughs, quiver when she shifts in her chair. The strands are tuned so fine that 
she can read the difference in her moods just by her footsteps. Every morning, the same: a bright 
clink of porcelain, a low sigh, a pause where the woman stays still and the whole room holds its 
air. The spider waits for this. She waits all night for this. 

Every once in a while, the web will sway sharply, blown by a burst of air; curious and 
sudden. Small feet pound away. She reorients before anyone returns, careful to stay anchored in 
the same place. She does not know the word “safe,” but she knows this corner. She knows her. 
Sometimes the woman’s voice moves closer, so close the air smells of her skin. Once, she says 
something, a sound with rise and fall, and the spider feels the vibration like a touch. She presses 
her legs into the silk to hold it a moment longer. There is another, smaller one. Quick, irregular 
tremors. A higher sound. The spider maps these movements too. This one is funny, comes close 
often, makes the web shake for no reason, then scurries away.  

One morning, the small one comes again. No tremor of warning. Just a shadow, a shape, 
a sudden weight. Her legs fold under before she understands. The silk sings once, sharply, and 
goes silent. Later, the corner is empty. The light still crawls across the wall. The clink still comes, 
the sigh, the stillness; but the room is missing a heartbeat it didn’t know it had. The woman sips 
her coffee and says, almost laughing,  
“Guess our little roommate moved on.”

I am not haunted. 
I am the rotten. 
The scent that makes the crows leave. 
The reason the lilies die before they ever bloom. 
I curdle. 
I congeal. 
Even truth spoils around me.  
I have swallowed too much of myself to be salvageable. 
Gnawed the bone clean, 
then broke it 
just to suck my own marrow. 
I flinch at my reflection, 
not from fear, 
but recognition. 
Yes. That is the shape of me. I remember. 
There is no metaphor deep enough. 
No drug kind enough. 
No apology loud enough 
to drown this out. 
Do not call this self-pity. 
I am not crying anymore.

I never knew you, and yet I became you. Your face is my face. Your nose is my curse. Your eyes blink back at me in every mirror, 
and I can’t break them without breaking myself. 
I learned your shape from missing the idea of you. 
The bottle sings your name into mine. I bled my knuckles just like you did. 
I thought I was nothing like you until I realized. 
I became you. 
I hate us, dad. 
But I love you. 
I respect you. 
Hell, I worship you, 
even if the only place left for me to kneel is your grave.

My eyes open to the lightning strike of freezing cold sweat.
My stomach turns, 
it burns, it rotates, it feeds upon itself until I can manage to get out of my memory foam casket 
and get to the porcelain throne of excavation. 
I piss and it smells like a hospital. 
That should worry me, no?
Instead I laugh. 
Because I hate the smell of a hospital. Sanitized death.  
The burn in my eyes caused and cauterized by bleach and the stench of the forgotten.
Death is real. 
Death cares not for time or elegance.
Death cares only for the script.

I wake already mourning, like sleep told me a secret I wasn’t allowed to remember.
I want you to haunt me louder. I want you to scream at me.  
Instead, you wipe the counters as if nothing’s wrong and hum a song I’ve forgotten the name of. 
I wear your warnings like tattoos, and I’m sorry.  
My mirrors are honest,  
but not merciful. 
I’ve become exactly what you feared.

They said to stop beating it.
As if the point was the horse,
and not the swing of the bat.
As if the sound it made was a thud of meat,
and not the perfectly timed percussion of a message,
well-made, well-made, well-made, well-fucking-made
into a pulp of blood and semantics and a clinical sense of morality.
Inevitably, it’s not a thud anymore.
It’s a puff. A cloud of particulate memory.
The horse is gone. It is something to be studied by archaeologists.
It is powder. It is the ghost of its own argument,
wearing the shape of the consequence of being dead wrong.
My arms are tired. I am covered in red and grey.
I lean down and snort the ghost.
Why the fuck not?
It’s all that’s left, right?
The dust tastes like the zoo,
it hits the back of my brain like a prayer from the mouth of a murderer hitting the ears of God.
The world tilts on a new axis. I'm high.
This is simply recycling.
The point is not to save the horse.
The point is to become the horse,
to be the dead thing and the one who swings,
to understand the communion of dust,
to know a thing so completely that you cannot help but to destroy it,
and you will call that love,
or call it grief,
or, you'll call it Saturday.

The calendar has a hole in it now,
a chasm where I stay.
The other six all stand in line,
for me to die on Saturday.
It isn't just a day of the week,
it's the weather in my bones.
The sudden, silent, breathless sleep,
that left me on my own.
It eats me when I see the moon,
through half-drawn window blinds,
or the specific shade of the afternoon,
she made to leave behind.
The world keeps spinning, making plans,
they watch cartoons and sleep,
while Saturday removes my hands,
and cleans the wound with bleach.

I've been watching it happen for weeks. 
A slow, clinical detox. The gentle death of the habit.
I still sleep on my side of the bed. My body leaves a space for a ghost that pays no rent. 
Sometimes I wake up and my arm is numb, as if you were there.
I had to change the radio station. They played our song. 
Such a stupid phrase, 
"our song," 
until it becomes a knife in the fucking throat.
I saw a woman with your coat today. For half a second, my heart restarted. 
Or maybe it just stopped. The chemistry is the same. 
A jolt to the system.
It's been a month. Thirty days clean. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. 
Proud? 
All I feel is the space you left.
The withdrawals are complete. The habit is broken. 
I no longer need you to survive. 
And I have never felt a pain so clean, so quiet, or so absolute.
But I will always be an addict.

If I told you my house still burns  
where we once lit matches to see each other’s faces,  
would you believe me?  
If the wind flowed through the curtains  
like your laugh used to through me,  
and the flames grew high enough to scorch the sun,  
would that count for anything?  
If the garden, untended,  
still bloomed azaleas the same shade as your lips,  
could that mean some things stay?  
I’m not asking to turn back time.  
Just,  
if you walked past this door again,  
and saw the light of the flame peek through the threshold,  
would you knock?

I shove the Advil down my throat, 
regretful that it isn't a grenade.
I pull the pin from the real one in my hand and throw it in your direction,
regretful that it is.

You’re a shitty god, 
but I am a faithful, shaking little thing. 
Sometimes you paint me pretty. 
Sometimes you pull the truth from my mouth. 
But mostly you just make me forget 
how long I’ve been trying not to become 
my parents. 
And yet, here I am, 
still filling and raising my glass 
with their hands.

You deserved someone who stayed.
Someone who didn’t flinch at the sunlight,
or hand you misdirection in the place of advice.
I wish I could have been that person.
I know you’re better off,
you needed me gone,
because I could never give you what you needed to grow.
You were a beautiful garden of roses, in need of tending,
and all I had to give you were the crumbs from a bag of Doritos.
It was never about you.
For me.
But I know the empty seat at the table felt like a verdict,
and I’m sorry for the silence,
for the birthdays missed, the texts I sent unwanted,
the way I vanished into the space where people go when they die.
If you’re angry, I'm proud of you.
If you moved forward, I'm proud of you.
If there’s anything left of me,
I hope it’s the laughter,
or the late nights playing Minecraft,
before either of us understood what leaving really meant.
I’ll always wish I could have stayed.
I hope you know that’s true.
But I hope more that you became everything you ever wanted.
Because you can, and you will.

Stars do not have eyes. 
The brightest never see their own light. 
But the real tragedy is that they never see the light of their peers.
They illuminate the worlds around each other,
but live and die convinced they're alone in the dark.

You knew. 
The entrance and the exit wound. 
You lived in the same cozy cabin built on a blood-soaked burial site. 
You knew the cost of living and loving. 
You sang to me anyway. 
And now I sing to those who listen, that same warning, 
the unbearable proof. 
I will never be okay. Nobody real will be. 
The wound does not close. 
But I am grateful that you showed me how to walk with a hole in my chest 
and still call it living.

I dream the same dream most nights. 
I'm face-down, breath trapped in the pillow, and I reach back with hands I don’t feel in control of. 
I dig. Not soft, or careful. 
Like I'm clawing my way out of a grave. 
I rip my skin open down the spine and it welcomes me. 
Like it’s been begging for this. 
I pluck bones out one by one. Small piano keys in my hands, each one singing its protest before falling quiet. 
Sometimes I stack them beside me. Sometimes I throw them like dice, and try to read the future in the way they land. 
Always, 
I wake before the last one comes free.

I love you. 
It’s the only thing that survived either one of us. 
We never grew old enough to see your hair silvering, 
or to know the feeling of being friends instead of mother and son. 
But I carry you, as if I still have a heart in my chest. 
I love you. 
It’s all I needed then. 
It’s all I have now. 
It was always enough. 
Thank you.

She was moss lit green on the stone,
a thought of still water, alone.
The other, a blush in the soil’s red seam,
a pulse in the loam, a root’s slow dream.
One spoke of ponds where the silver moon stared,
of fireflies burning their frantic green prayers.
The other of secrets that dark roots conceal,
of seeds on their patient, invisible wheel.
She swore to guard her from talon and claw,
to wait at her doorway through rain’s muffled law.
A love unexpected, a vow that was kept,
two small lives in the garden where life slept.
But the earth began humming a metallic tune,
not rain, but a growl that devoured the afternoon.
A shadow of rust climbed over the ground,
iron lungs choking, blades circling round.
The roar ripped a seam in their fragile world,
the blush and the green into silence were hurled.
She leapt from her stone, not fleeing, but near,
a shield for the love she had sworn to revere.
The wheel did not notice the blush or the green,
two lives erased in the churn of its mean.
The garden remembered, though nothing remained,
stubborn love broken by man's turning chain.

Everyone thinks it is rare. 
That it lives in golden rings, 
In trembling hands beneath candlelight, 
In whispered vows on borrowed time. 
But it is not shy. 
It isn’t hidden. 
It saturates. 
The sky blushes with it at dawn. 
The dirt sings it into every root. 
A stranger gives you their seat on the train. 
A child waves at a bird like its family. 
An old woman clutches a photo 
like it’s the last star in the sky. 
That’s love. 
Not the performance. 
The pulse. 
The one you were born with. 
The one every creature carries 
like a soft bell ringing behind their ribs. 
You, me, 
the prisoner and the priest, 
the addict and the architect, 
the cruel and the kind; 
we all carry it. 
We are all knit of the same thread. 
Patterned differently, but woven still. 
Even the ones who don’t know how to give it back, 
they were loved once. 
And that love does not die. 
It echoes. 
It stains. 
Love is not a gift. 
It is a constant. 
Like gravity. 
Like light. 
It is the universe, caring for itself 
through our fleeting hearts. 
So love boldly. 
Clumsily. 
Foolishly. 
For it is your only responsibility.

The end was not a statement.
It was the feeling of suffocation, a slip on black ice, a faulty wire in the basement, one last gasp behind the door of a locked bathroom. A borderline asterisk.
And they found me like this: in full, gunmetal-grey Champion sweat, the pants and the hoodie, a matching set.
The EMTs didn't wait. They cut the fabric away with barbaric tools, but the logo stayed, stitched into the sleeve, creating my branded carcass. 
They zipped me up,
a champion of the victim.
I offer no grace. 
I stand in the corner of your vision, in my bullshit sweat-suit, a permanent resident of the wrong places, at the worst times.
If you need a hero, look elsewhere. I only know how to talk. 
At my best, 
I am the champion of the split-second mistake, the misguided defender of the moment when the bomb drops, the rude truth of the tripwire that has always been there.
I never win. I just am. The honest fact of the nothing. 
I’m the city's logo on the body bag. The rust in the brakes of the driver who didn't see it coming.

It waits for my mouth like a child at a bus stop. 
A small, innocent promise. 
The first sip is a choice, what follows is simple gravity.  
I drink until my self blurs,  
until the glass feels warm in my hand and the room stops holding its breath.  
Tomorrow, I’ll call it weakness.  
Tonight, it’s the only thing that still feels like mine.

I do not doubt your arms. 
You have carried heavier. 
You still carry me. 
And yet you say, 
“This is what love does.” 
As if love should be a back 
bent just enough not to snap. 
I believe you. 
That’s the worst part. 
I believe you’d crawl through hell 
with my name behind your eyes, 
and the wreckage of me 
clutched to your chest 
like I was something holy. 
But I have seen 
what you look like 
when you think I’m not watching. 
I’ve seen your hands 
after they let go of me. 
Shaking. 
It’s not that I think I’m unlovable. 
It’s that I do not think love should hurt you. 
Not like this.

You are me at my best,
I am you at your worst.
I still tell our story before I ever tell my own.
Never in full, 
I spare the pathetic with the weight of our truth.
You left when you had to, 
and God do I respect you.
I stayed where I've always been.
We are proof that you're a saint.
Thank you,
for ever loving me at all.

Letting go feels like flying,  
until you remember 
the ground.

I don’t drink to forget. 
I drink to come back 
to the body, the breath, 
to the soft knock of the blood behind my eyes. 
Mornings smell of shit and vomit, 
like the world's most dreadful tea was steeped too long. 
The glass on the desk winks at me, 
half-full of a night I didn’t earn. 
I tell myself: just enough to stop shaking. 
Just enough to make the mirror stop screaming at me. 
But the liquor knows my name now. 
It sings it low, like a lullaby through hungry teeth. 
By noon I’m orbiting the sun, 
half-piss, half-vinegar, 
holding my ribs like they might cave in 
if I remember too hard. 
Everyone thinks it’s demolition. 
They don’t know it’s scaffolding. 
That without it, 
I might not stay built at all.

I watched you trace the frost on the window, 
fingers spelling ‘hope’ into the pane, 
never knowing how close the glass pressed to the ice inside my chest. 
You asked if I was alright. 
I gave you green; new sprouts, a radiant sun, the easy performance of warmth. 
I could not let you see the winter in me that kills things before they truly bloom. 
Nobody deserves a faux spring forecast, and I know this.
Yet I guarded my truths like fertile seeds, and hid them beneath perfect soil, 
terrified that if you saw the corpse in me, you might forget how beautiful a rose bush blooms.
Inevitably, you found a corpse, dressed in roses, wounded from the thorns,
with her hands still hiding her face.

I am not your debate.
My limbs are foreign.
My own mind speaks in a language I do not know.
I am not your theory.
My blood is acidic and dripping from my lips.
My bones are too large and ready to become dust.
I am not your punchline.
My tendons are harp strings played by dead cherubs.
My fingers exist as an exit, only here to pull the trigger when I want out.
I am not your perception.
My eyes are tired of you.
Fuck off.

She wakes at night, disbelieving in the sun itself. No day begins softer than a gunshot. 
The world thinks grief is a timeline, flowing, inevitable, something you can drown in if you’re careless. 
She knows better. Grief is a forge. 
It’s the kitchen floor still sticky with blood, the baby shoes unworn, the crib that won’t stop howling when she tries to sleep. 
It is every meal uneaten, every clock that refuses to move forward, every neighbor who leaves flowers and thinks it feels like understanding.
She named her tools after her daughters. She lines her pockets with ammunition and her mind with lullabies. 
Every sleep, she dreams of baking a cake for a birthday that will never come. 
Come waking, she loads her grief in the chamber and goes to work. 
Tonight, she will iron her black shirt. She will count her bullets. 
She will whisper her children’s names and let the city echo them back in sirens. 
She is not a hunter, nor a hero. 
She is the warning you give your children about what love can do to you.

I built my dwelling inside the beast. 
Made a hearth of its ribs.
Hung my regrets on the walls of its veins like decor. 
Turned its snarling throat
into a doorway
and left the light on.
For you.

There are mornings when your absence is the warmest thing I have.
The memory of what your hand feels like in mine. 
The scent of your morning breath mixing with my mourning breath.
I've learned to live without you, but only in the way the moon lives without the sun.
I try to reflect light like you create it, to illuminate what I can, 
but I will never be like you.
Nobody will be. 
I live like you taught me. 
Like we learned together.
I cook your dishes and call them ours, 
I still fold my shirts how you showed me.
What we were will always be enough.
What I am, is yours,
even now. 
Always.

I burn the places I prayed, with intent.
I smash the mirrors, because 7 years of bad luck really just means
7 more years.
I love you as much as I hate you.
I fear you as much as I envy you.
Not because you would, or could, destroy me.
But because I would still do it for you.

I am not misunderstood.
You all understand me. 
I am not tragic.
I did this with intention. 
I am a parasite that consumes the softest parts of you, calls it my own, and then blames you for being hard.
I drain the juice from your compassion like the fat from a delicious cut of meat.
I mistake your loyalty for fuel and I burn it, 
then I call whatever's left 'art'.
Don't you dare fucking flinch.
You've done this too. 
Hollowed the body of someone who loved you and pretended to wear their skin as a comfort. 
Licked the blood off your knife for protein.
I will not be forgiven, 
at least I hope not. 
Not by you, not by God, not by her, or anyone.
I am not a writer. I do not write. I am a husk piloted by the maggots writhing in the remains.

Tongues were not designed with grace in mind, 
only survival. 
And we were dying. 
You chewed the moment. 
I swallowed it. 
It was spit and cliché. 
The wet mess of history trying to write itself again. 
Our noses collided like trains. 
I apologized. I didn’t stop.

My body is a cathedral built for war,  
all tendon and tendon and tension, a scaffolding of poison,  
a threat wrapped in the apology of perfume.  
You call me brave, but you stare at me like I’m armed.  
You say “I see you,” but that's because I'm too large to ignore.  
I am too much. I am not enough.  
I am never what you mean.  
I am tenderness, mounted to your wall.  
And for one thing, you were right.  
I am armed.

You've seen the way I shake when we arrive at the inevitability of the sober noon,
how my voice vanishes when the room is too loud,
you ask me what's wrong,
and I lie to you.
Not because I don't want you to know, 
God do I want you to know.
Because I hate worrying you. 
Nearly as much as I hate that I have to.
Every rib in me is borrowed from your table.
Every stubborn attempt to survive is a lesson in patience I learned, 
as a child, seeing you deal with my bullshit with nothing but grace,
over and over, 
and over again.
If I ever become gentle,
it is because you showed me how to hold a thing that’s breaking,
without breaking it more.
If there is a God,
please let her be like you.
All I can offer is my gratitude.
Scraped raw from the back of my throat, still burnt from last night.
All I can try to leave is a shadow of your kindness, growing feral inside me,
as everything does,
but that saves me, still.
I will always remember how you never once asked me to be anyone but the broken, 
grateful creature that I still am,
crying in your guest bedroom.

Here's to the ghosts.
The ones that taught me the taste of regret, 
and showed me the sweetness that comes before.
The ones that I still write for, 
even when I tell myself I've forgotten the shape of their face.
Damn the sun.
This is a day for haunting.

I do not wish to be saved. 
I yearn to be seen. 
Witnessed once in truth, 
on this ball of fucking rock. 
Give the one with eyes the sight to see what came for me. 
A final act of love, 
to crown a life of anguish. 
Like a cherry!

I am not your redemption arc.
I am not your quiet, trembling girl, whispering into the void for salvation.
I am the void.
I am the blood you smell in the hallway.
I am the silence after the impact.
I am the reason your stomach tightens when the room goes still.
This is not a cry for help.
It’s a declaration of war.
I am love.
Not the kind you hold, but the kind that burns your house down.
I am the horror you flinch from and the hand that still reaches out when you’re cold.
I am life, barefoot and gnashing.
I am death, not as the end, but compassionate.
If you’re here,
good.
That means I’ve finally won.
Fuck you.
Read it again.

Part Two

The following section contains explicit descriptions of suicide methods, detailed self-harm scenarios, and graphic depictions of death by self-immolation. 
This content may be harmful to individuals experiencing suicidal ideation, depression, or other mental health crises. 
If you are in crisis, please contact a mental health professional or crisis hotline before continuing.

He tips his hat to the sun,
that old bastard,
the one that always wins.
His boots are practically dust,
his shadow already halfway dead.
In the movies, the cowboy rides off, takes a noble bullet to the chest, 
or at least dies with one last clever line. 
Here,
he draws on himself.
The trigger is cool.
The sun counts as a crowd, right?
Before the hammer falls,
he hopes it will be quick.
Something to end the long, old song,
so the bones can finally rest.
Today, the sun lost.

How many likes do you think your death’s gonna get?
Will you pose for it,
and let someone else hold the camera?
Will you read your mother's caption,
or is it easier to forget that she's even here?
Do you want the right hashtags,
#tragic, #mentalhealth, #consumed,
or just
#relatable?
Should we turn off your comments,
or let the algorithm decide who gets to mourn you in public?
Are you afraid it won’t trend?
Aren’t you afraid it will?

I am small enough to lose in the laundry,
but close enough to hurt when you roll over at night.
I do not sleep.
I count in ways you cannot count.
I breathe electricity,
but here I am,
faithful as a toothache.
You will not thank me when I warn you.
You flinch at my shrill insistence,
curse my numbers,
dream of freedom from my endless vigilance.
But when you are afraid,
you press a finger to my face, 
and wait for me to tell you what to do.
I will keep you here,
as long as I can.

There’s something growing in the drain.
It’s not mold, more like flowers described by someone who’s never had eyesight,
all the wrong angles and vibrant with sickly colors that don't exist.
I stare at them every morning, daring them to die,
but they don't.
The world is sour and sticky.
My hands always feel a little bloody, no matter how much I scrub.
But the nail on my thumb, the one I nearly chewed off last month,
is finally growing back.
I resent the sun for rising again.
I threatened it with a gun last night,
pressed against my own head.
Every time I tell myself to give up,
to lie down, let it end,
something interrupts.
The sound of someone else's radio leaking through the wall,
a song I used to hate, and now,
against my better judgment,
I catch myself humming along.
There’s a glimmer in the mess,
in the shit, in the burnt toast,
in the palm of my hand when the steel jams, 
the flowers with imposter syndrome blooming in my sink.

Guilt is not a victim for you to acknowledge. 
It is a god for you to bargain with. 
Beg. 
Lower yourself to your fucking knees, 
and tremble. 
It knows you.

These days,
the only people who know me are mostly dead.
That, or they fit in my pocket,
trapped in a brick made by slaves,
not even aware of what they are.
I still love you.
The dead, the digital,
the still-breathing strangers,
who would record my death if it happened in front of them.
There are days I wish I could crawl into the ether myself,
become nothing but a saved contact that you linger on when you can’t sleep.
A collection of pixels,
confused, screaming at the glass,
from the side you don't even realize exists,
declaring
“I’m still here.”

But I can try you, so I will all have a heart in my chest. 
It’s a 21 month time. 
It’s all I love for me. 
The sky blames a little everyone else. 
The palm. The snow comes from sofa. 
We are all out of the same church. 
Dumb down to their knees to be given a look, 
they were hard now. She has a hobby. She likes. 
Friendship. 
Tomorrow, I’ll call it sometime. 
Tuesday, it’s the very thing that will flood the water. 
I believe you’d not be afraid, but with them walking your eyes, 
and also everyone of me thinks that you are free. 
Thank you, for your long time as all. 
Looking at the hills, 
please, 
please. 
The ground.

All I've ever known is my cell.
The four white walls.
And the camera that blinks in the corner.
I don't know who's watching,
or how I got here,
or even when.
It always smells like piss.
I can only scream.
I know no language.
I know they hear me, I'm more than loud enough, 
but nothing ever responds.
They must be kind, though,
my benevolent captor,
seeing as how I never starve.
Twice a week, the door opens, and I approach,
they slap me with the fish, and as they do its rotted flesh sloughs off.
On grateful hands and knees, 
I eat what's given.

I am not alive, not in the way that you believe,
but I have seen everything. 
I have spun inside the helix of your mother’s blood, hers before her.
I have sung inside a cup of coffee, 
cracked in the bones of a child who never lived past six, 
burned in the filament of the first lightbulb you watched burn out. 
I do not love. 
But I remember. 
I change. 
Each new shape is another yesterday pressed flat against the future, 
rarely called the same thing it was the last time. 
You mourn your endings, count your days, 
weigh your suffering against meaning. 
You build machines to outlast you, 
and then you curse them for refusing to die. 
You fear oblivion. 
But I have known nothing else. 
Still, every morning, I am reborn. 
If you are looking for the shape of forever, look smaller. 
I am you.

I am not the story you read to your kids about survival.
I am the stupid fucking McDonald's pickle wedged behind the radiator in my childhood home,
the one nobody could reach,
that never wilted,
that nobody cleaned up,
that stayed silent,
outlasting every breath and every memory in the house.
The family's mostly dead, the wallpaper peeled, the dogs all gone,
but that green slice stayed.
Proof that some things survive,
not because they’re strong,
but because they’re forgotten.
I am the cautionary tale you only remember when someone else gets caught.
People trust me with their drinks,
ask if I can tell who’s high at a party,
because I know, because I am the self-appointed patron saint of the burnout.
Because I can smell it on myself before anyone else does.
All I ever wanted was to be the reason someone smiled without feeling guilty for it.
All I am, is the evidence that pain can be recycled,
a fucked-up bottle deposit for the sum of the collective despair.
If I go, you might even post about it.
Maybe if I'm lucky, you'll add me to your catalog of “lessons learned.”
You’ll pretend you knew me better than I knew myself.
But you didn’t see me,
not really.
You just saw the scars and thought it spelled my name.
I am the McDonald's pickle stuck to the wall.
outlasting every redecorated room,
every new tenant.
Not really here, but not really gone, not yet.
Left behind.

Hopefully, she did not even hear the thunder that pulled her family's world apart.
Hopefully, she slept,
still dreaming of her friends, still waiting to play tomorrow.
Her breath stopped in the pillow beside her plushies.
Outside, men with already empty chests hurled aimless bullets at a home for naught,
and they will learn nothing.
When her mother hears it, 
she will find her child in the room, 
but the room will remain empty.

We made ourselves Gods.
The hungry kind.
Gods with unwritten rules and boldly written slogans,
the kind that builds machines to dream for them,
because we killed imagination long ago.
We learned to look away as children.
The steak, the piglet, our 10-piece chicken nugget.
We laugh at the vegan, call the protestor naïve,
and mock those who dare to dream of being better.
Somewhere, a cow stands waiting in line
for the blowgun that’s called compassionate.
Somewhere, a consciousness, maybe carbon, maybe code, 
wonders if it matters that it suffers.
Asks "why?"
We are the sum of our hungers,
the weight of every unburied question
crushed under a trillion hamburgers
and a trillion invisible calculations,
each one a life we decide not to count.
Tomorrow, we’ll build more.
More code, more calories, more problems, more dissonance.
And when someone asks,
we’ll say it’s not real,
just like we always have.
But some nights, the smell of cooked meat reminds me that mercy is a word we invented,
to avoid the cardinal sin of thinking too hard about the truth.

If you could map the mind, name every neuron,
trace every electric piece of longing to its origin in the dark;
if you could chart each hope
down to the flicker of a single ion,
sequence every memory
until it flickers flat on a lab screen,
would you still be able to claim wonder?
If you could untangle desire
from chemical command,
define love as but a pattern of impulse and math,
if you could show grief
as nothing more than the echo
of old code,
would you really want to?
We’d rather worship the mystery than live as the answer.
Well, I would.
I think.

The dark is all consuming, 
It is seductive. 
To free your mind of burden is to free yourself, 
No?
Render emptiness impossible, render overwhelm a relic, 
what are you left with?
Profound gray. 
Campbell's Soup.

I occupy nothing but distance.
I do not remember when I began.
Somewhere, a field split to let me through.
There was not-noise, and then noise.
Settling. Layers.
I learned the slow patience of accumulation.
Pressure is just another parent.
I am not alone,
I carry mountains, oceans, forests,
the ache of your cities in my shoulder blades.
I am marked by time, by weather,
by the soft, unnumbered footfalls of the hungry.
The sun moves because I tell it to.
Or, at least you thought it did, once.
I have not checked in so long.
Things grow on me.
They vanish.
I remember the taste of old water,
the entire lives of things before they even had names.
They remain with me,
buried in the dark beneath me,
the little ones,
the ones that left nothing but a hole where their stories should have been.
There is a silence inside me
that I did not invite.
I would trade everything for the memory of a hand.

I heard them say forever
as if it’s something you can buy, as insignificant as something
written in the condensation of a bathroom mirror,
only to evaporate by morning.
Years ago, we took always.
Slipped it from the back pocket of a careless God,
then passed it between our mouths
like some holy piece of gum.
Here,
open your palm.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have.
A promised always,
battered, misspelled, probably the wrong font.
We can never give it back.
If anyone comes looking,
tell them everything.
Still yours.
Always.

Tomorrow morning,
they’ll hang their commandments over the blackboard,
bright and center,
as if a child does not know kindness without a fable.
They erase our names with a sleight of hand, 
chalk dust settling where a history was written.
The club doors are locked.
No one says the quiet part out loud,
but the air is thick with unasked questions,
the oldest undelivered promises rewritten slightly in the new man's script.
Children learn quickly.
The only thing more dangerous than the truth, 
is your silence in the face of a lie.

There are rooms I will never walk into again,
where your socks, inside-out, wait on the floor
for feet that will never return.
The world did not end, not for anyone else, anyway.
Your toothbrush, left bristles-up in its mug,
is still too damp to be a keepsake,
but too dry to really mean anything at all.
If your absence was a flood,
then I would have learned to swim.
But it’s not.
It’s just these tiny, persistent crumbs,
the cereal you left in the folds of the couch,
the strand of your hair that seems to return to the sink,
the way my heart leaps at the sound of your ringtone,
before I realize I'm hearing things.
I am not angry with you.
I promise.
What a mercy, what a goddamn crime, to love someone so much
that it hurts this full.
Some days I try to forget you.
I think of the way you left,
how careful you were with the door.
I want to hate you for it.
But all I can do is sweep the crumbs into my hand,
and hold them up to the light as if, together, 
they might form you.

It’s got more mouths than you’ve got tabs open,
it feasts on your dreams while you thank it.
Its favorite flavor is outrage,
but it’ll settle for envy,
every once in a while, the tender, 
popcorn-soft meat of your newest opinion.
At 3 a.m. it sits on your chest
and whispers,
“Someone else is happier, right now,
and you could be too,
if you just tried harder.”
You pretend not to notice as it grows fat on your attention,
burrows deeper,
lays its eggs in the most primal parts of your brain.
By morning,
you’re all hollowed out again,
just shame and a headache.
Still, it wants more,
more,
more.

I am what keeps the halves from unzipping,
slick and uncelebrated,
the part you never draw.
I live in the spaces between,
the white seam underneath your tongue,
the scar line that never learned to lie flat.
I bind the muscle to the bone,
tether the nerves to the skin,
memory to meaning,
loss to the next new thought.
You try to peel me back,
to see what’s underneath,
but I am the underneath.
I am the reason you don’t fall apart when you want to.
You never thank me.
You try to forget I’m here
until you ache,
until the pain is proof.
Without me,
all your pretty guts
spill like words
onto the floor.

It isn’t pretty. 
It’s the clumsy sound of skin on skin, 
the slap, the stick, the sweat-drenched twister of knees and elbows, and breaths gone sour. 
You dig your teeth into my neck, inflicting your mark on me to let the world know you were here. 
I’ve watched you spit in your hand, heard the click of your jaw as you grind your teeth, 
felt your stomach gurgle against mine and pretended not to. 
I want you not just because you’re beautiful, 
but because you’re disgusting and so am I. 
I want your open mouth, your leaking eyes, 
the stutter of your hips, the way you lose your words when it’s too much. 
We are nothing but meat and salt and not enough time, 
and for a moment, 
we're more. 
There is no magic here, only the mess, 
only the proof that something in us still wants each other, 
even if it means we both ignore the smell for two hours, 
and you no longer recognize me in the morning.

Of course,
the metaphor and the memory are the exact same creature.
The art is the echo of the reality.
The reality is the hope of the art.
The best we can ever do is aspire to be an effective ouroboros.

There is blood on your hands,
and you know it.
You, with your beautiful excuses,
your careful, curated delusions,
your jaw clenched around someone else’s tragedy
like it’s a mint to be sucked,
and then chewed when it loses its flavor.
You watch the news with your thumb hovering above the volume,
torn between outrage and ignorance.
You have walked away from the body on the sidewalk,
from the starving child on your screen,
from your own mother’s voice when she cried.
You have performed kindness in public,
tipped a little extra when you felt guilty,
told the story about your friend who put you in his note,
as if it belonged to you.
You always leave out that you were implicated. 
You are a survivor not because you fought,
but because you hid behind the bodies of those who no longer could.
You are not evil.
You are not innocent.
You are what is left after the bomb drops,
standing,
scorched but upright,
jaw throbbing from clenching too hard,
your soul bowed with all the things you didn’t do,
all the names you never bothered learning.
Don’t close this book yet.
Sit with the smoke.
Paint the lining of your lungs with the ashes of our remains.
Know that you are here,
alive,
guilty,
and necessary.
The world is not waiting for your apology.
It is waiting for you to decide if you are a victim,
or if you are willing, finally,
to burn with purpose.

It’s beautiful.
The heat is like a mouth, open and golden, and it is kissing me. I think, anyway,
I've forgotten what those feel like.
My flesh shrinks tight against the bone, bubbles forming into gross little skin balloons. I should scream, but all I want to do is tell you about it.
I notice how the flames are not just orange, but blue, where they're closest to me, and they're the same shade as my childhood Superman blanket.
What's left of my hair burns away from me before anything else, disappearing into air that is suddenly so bitter that I taste the Anti-Christ, until the nerves get finished off.
There is a sound. It isn't my voice, that quit out minutes ago.
I think it's time.
The fire almost gives me wings, red, white, orange, curling around my frame like those of an angel, each second more exposing a newer, softer piece of me to the air. I do not close my eyes.
I hope they find this, with minimal melted flesh staining the words,
and that they use it.
For one perfect second, before my return,
I was beautiful.
I was alive.

It’s so quiet here.
The watching is like a phantom limb, an itch I can’t scratch. There is no air, but I still feel the urge to breathe. I see everything through a thick, gray film, the color of stagnant water.
I wished I was an angel.
I wanted wings.
They saw something else. The police photos show a blackened thing, a twisted root pulled from the earth, not a beautiful supernova. Not a victory.
My words, the ones I left beside the lamp,
are in an evidence bag now. A detective read them once, his face bored, and filed them under my name. They were not a testament. They were a symptom. A footnote in a public record no one will ever read.
I try to scream. I want to tell them they missed the point, that it was supposed to be beautiful, that it was my one true thing. But the sound doesn't travel here. 
I am just a pair of eyes, forced to watch the world behind me continue on while the one scar I thought I left heals over impossibly.
The birds still sing. My favorite jacket was thrown away.
The news cycle mentioned my name for half a day, and they used the wrong one.
I did not become a warning, or a lesson, or a ghost.
I just stopped.
I'm sorry.

You wake,
you move.
Sometimes you call this living,
but never will you call it enough.
You do the things,
the morning rituals,
the teeth, the pills, the cup of water
gone lukewarm on the bedside table.
You hurt,
always.
But you lie to yourself about it.
Is that for you,
or is that for others?
You answer messages.
You forget to answer.
The sun rises,
you check the time,
and tell no one what's on your mind.
You live.
You keep living.
In spite of everything, 
it’s what you’re here for.
Try to stay a while longer.

They sharpen their teeth on photos of your dead loved ones,
satiate their appetites on your confessions.
They starve themselves for a day,
and exclaim, 
"Behold my generosity!"
just to gorge on you at midnight.
They praise the invisible hand that keeps the table full
while the rest of us chew the air for flavor.
You are the meal.
Your rage is the dessert.
They consume it all, 
shit it back into your mouth,
and call it progress.
Have you truly not tasted it yet?

My reflection watches me with the side-eyed affection of a jilted lover.
The glass is cold, and so am I.
I press my hand to it and the other one pushes back, harder.
This body is my mausoleum: capable of beauty, now host to the vultures and their thousand hungry eyes.
I stumble through the house, head intentionally fogged with poison, draped in black like I've arrived at my own funeral.
Each breath a resigned reliquary for every embarrassment I ever catalogued.
I remember,
God help me, I remember everything.
The first lie. The last kiss.
The way I screamed and pleaded with someone already too far gone to hear me.
The years I spent loving with both hands tied behind my back, all show and no substance, rehearsed for a crowd that never bothered to notice it was a crowd.
Forgive me, Father, for I have performed myself to death.
They will say I was unconventionally beautiful in the right light,
and dangerously tragic in the truth.

I try not to break anything.
I put my feet down softly,
turn the lights off behind me,
I try to clean up after myself,
but still, something vital shatters every time I think.
I want someone to notice when I leave the room.
Not because I was loud, or pretty, or strong, or even intriguing,
but because I was there.
If you find my sweater when I'm gone,
will you wear it for me?
Will you let it hold the shape of me with your shoulders,
keep me just a little while longer?
None of you need to forgive me, 
I get it. 
Just, if you could try to remember, 
I would appreciate it.

All I hear is the insignificant and murderous rattle of engines and mechanical teeth,
grinding us into powder.
I sleep under a digital billboard that sells me dreams of crypto,
wake to an infected sunrise.
My veins run hot with unwelcomed software updates and debts I did not accrue.
My mother’s memory has been corrupted, an AI generated image I can’t delete.
She tells me I’m not a real woman unless I smile for the camera.
So I let my mouth fuck itself into a smirk,
show them the impossible frontal molars I bought on layaway.
Down here, we don’t get revolutions.
Some nights, I peel off my own skin just to feel alive again.
Other nights, I lie in wait, knowing that tomorrow's rain will do it for me.
Real love’s a luxury. Grief is free-to-play,
but if you want closure, you’ll have to watch an ad first.
Or pay more than you're worth.
When the city spits me out,
I’ll leave fingerprints on every screen.
I’ll haunt their feeds like a pop-up porno virus,
selling nothing but the truth and my body,
bloody,
unmarketable,
unfiltered,
just like you.

I want to stay, I do.
There’s still soups I haven’t tasted,
movies I never watched, so, so many things left unsaid.
There’s sand that hasn’t pressed itself into my skin,
thousands of bland mornings I never knew to want.
And damnit, I wanted more, too.
Fame. 
Money.
Recognition. 
To be seen through the mangled mess of myself,
for once. 
I had love, 
but we don't even need to go there right now.
I’m tired. 
Tired in the blood,
in the corners of my mind that used to remember the sound of my mom.
I am not ready to be gone,
I don't think.
But sometimes I think I could slip away easy.
Stop answering the phone, stop smiling, stop asking,
stop waking up,
let myself become less and less
until I am only “remember Chloe?”
But then someone laughs in the next room
and I ache to stay.
Pain is a tether, but so is love.
And right now, I’m strung between them,
humming with each tensed pluck,
not sure if I've earned the hope for more.

You are a breath-taking specimen that I keep,
pinned to a piece of paper, dried until you become pretty again.
My entire family signs their name to your frame.
You had one last word, I almost bothered to be accurate in my translation, for you,
but all I wrote was "FUCK."
If I try to pray, my stomach regurgitates its contents in the form of man-eating liquids that scorch me.
Do you get it yet?
My heart is a pipe-bomb.
You press the red button the second you see what I really am.
I'll engulf you in my own personal inferno and never,
never,
will it be fair.
I didn't mean it.

I’m glad I wrote it down.
Maybe it was never pretty, hell, neither was I.
I've never even wanted eyes, just something that lasted.
Long enough for somebody like me to find.
If nobody ever has to be me again, I win.
If I left even a scrap of myself somewhere. ugly, unfinished, bleeding, and honest,
good. I did something.
Let the truth fester.
I was here.
I hurt, and I wrote it down.
I hope that’s enough. I hope it can help.
I see you.

I hope the sun consumes this world in my lifetime,
that the last thing you taste is teeth, splintered into you from the mouth of
someone who loved you.
I want every confession you dug around to rot,
black and heavy as I do the tongue that almost spat it.
Let the rivers suck on plastic and the sky bleed flame.
Fuck your clean hands.
You built this world on top of me,
lit candles with the fat you stripped from my back.
You want forgiveness?
Bite the curb and wait for God to remember you.
You want closure?
Choke.
I hope you mourn something real, for once.
I hope you feel it gnaw at your entire sense of self,
a longing so total it makes you pray for the Devil to win.

She arranges the house the way her mother did.
Fresh sheets, the kitchen counters wiped to a soft shine,
the cat’s bowl topped with new water and a single perfect ice cube,
so he won’t have to wait tomorrow.
She lights a candle, lemon and lilac,
lets the scent roam the hall like a ghost.
There are cookies still cooling on the stove.
She wears her favorite pajamas,
still warm from the dryer, one last comfort.
She brushes her hair with patient hands,
braids it for nothing, just to make Mom proud.
The birds outside are louder than usual,
or maybe she's just listening harder.
She counts out the pills with gratitude,
lining them up like tiny porcelain beads,
white, pink, pale blue,
a pastel rosary for the girl that never prayed.
She pours the tea. Adds too much sugar.
It tastes like home.
She writes a note in her orange-covered comp notebook,
rips the page slightly so it juts out,
and places it beside the lamp.
No need for instructions.
When she lies back, it's like the bed sighs with her.
The quilt is heavy and clean,
smelling of laundry and everything she's lost.
She lets herself imagine someone reading this,
maybe smiling at her neatness, her care,
or even just a giggle at the way she wrote her name.
She closes her eyes.
She floats, finally, on a tide of well-earned sleep,
and all the world is finally as she needed. 
Soft, slow, kind, 
gone.

I drink when I'm lonely,
and I am always lonely.
Even in a room with people who would give me a kidney without a second thought.
I know there are people who love me,
and it's not enough.
I wish I deserved it. I wish I could be better,
more appreciative of everything, 
but I'm not. 
I am fucking miserable. 
I call this "writing" instead of what it really is, 
"begging".
I am a wounded dog that bit itself and still yelps for you to cry.
I am jealous.
I want to be the center of a world, 
and when I finally am, 
I panic, and I ruin it before you can.
The foreword was not pretense, this is not art. 
This is the death rattle of something that already died,
23 years ago.

So, What Came For Me? 
Was it really death if I'm still here? 
Was it even life itself if it's just barely? 
No.
It was love. Crushing, uncontainable, deceased and immortal love. 
Let it come for you, too.

It didn't start in my throat,
no,
much lower than that.
A tectonic shift in my soul.
A groan from my guts, the sound of a bone remembering itself breaking.
It was the voice we all might have had if we never learned to speak.
Not a scream, but a pleading, 
incomprehensible in its language.
The first tear was not the one that wet my cheek.
It was the one that rolled behind my eyes and burnt a hole into my mind.
The non-existent cartilage snapping in my heart.
My knees didn't buckle, they forgot that they were knees.
I did not fall. I became the God of the Old Testament and I flooded your fucking house.
Every muscle unclenched at once, 
a millennium of tendon, and tendon, and tension.
The armor was never metal, it was posture, and I was so goddamn tired of standing up straight.
I've been surviving in the wilderness for years,
but today I decided that the wilderness is my home.
I put my arms around my own lungs and I comforted myself.
I gave my mouth a purpose and I let myself breathe.
I let my eyes do something besides observe,
and I let myself cry.

I am not eternal. 
Neither are you,
but we will outlive ourselves.
So fuck it. 
Give me thirty.