Runoff

The days go by in a steady cadence, like a heartbeat, or a horror film. They seem redundant and unnecessary only because you are absent from them. I'm jealous of the people who pass you in the streets, who sit behind you in class, who walk by you in the gym. They get to see you living your life, just being a person. And they can note your beauty, passively - file you away in their mental archive for the day. They don't have to hang on to your image in a panic like I do when I'm not sure when I'll get to do it again. That is fate's cruelty. My afternoons are pools filled with whatever makes up your blue, blue eyes, but I still come home parched every night. No wonder, when you've got a face like the sea and I've got a heart like a sponge.

And if I could jump into your pond for one second, I wouldn't even try to hold my head above the surface; I would just learn to breathe underwater. But right now I'm out of breath when yours gets deeper and deeper as you fall into a comatose sleep after dark. My thoughts speak with yours long after our mouths fall asleep. We clench sleep like soap suds in wet fingers. Every night is too slippery to hang on to. And if someone were to listen to me talk in my sleep all they would hear is the slow trickle of your name. Me, as I pull you out from your cataloged file, water-marked "My Favorite Daydream". What we have here is the universe's express consent and now I get to see your face alongside the sunshine every morning.

And if there is a God, then He watches us, scotch in His grimaced hand, with palpable envy.

Before You Sleep,

You are not as terrible as you think you are. When you told me how you deal with things, that you just get through it, that you tread water for a short time and keep your eyes off the future, I thought it was brilliant - the perfect concoction of distraction and short-term self-discipline. As long as you don't look out the window at WWIII, it's not happening. What luck have you fallen into, that you begin your journey with the same coping mechanism that the veterans learn to adopt? But it comes with one fatal flaw: you keep your eyes on your shoes so long you fail to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

You fail to see yourself as I do. You miss the beautiful wide-angle shot. You don't see a birthday cake with 28 candles on it. You don't see a birthday cake with 29. I see a few years in your eyes, five more in your words, a whole decade in your smile. Your strong hands grip at least twenty years, even though you don't notice. I see eons of time. You don't see the children and the warmth and the Christmas stockings. I refuse to accept your hypothesis about dying childless because your genes are too beautiful to waste. If life continues after your extinction, it will be that much worse for the world. You don't know that your heartbeat is so much louder than the gunshot fired through your consciousness each morning. You're the last copy of a book in a burning library, and I'm not fucking strong enough to yank the fire alarm. I regret to tell you that my mother only prepared me for visible wounds. You think you dug this hole and pushed me into it, but let me tell you how sweet the soil is at the bottom.