I'm still not entirely sure how I'd so obliviously obtained the illusion that such hope could delay the hands of time from ticking down to midnight.

Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don't fucking think about it don't think about it

everything
is clouded, asphyxiating
reverberating madness
fuck
don't think about it

And then I read this thing that said "If you act like you have no feelings, you will get treated like you don't" and my god it fucking terrified me.

hand me the blade
and call it love.
how could i not
have loved you back?
the silver is enough,
don’t offer yourself as my cutting board, too.

and here in my hands are photo booth strips taken with people who’ve forgotten me. the saturation fades eventually. every candid moment, every crest of laughter, frozen into chemicals have been condensed to this. i can still hear the confusion in never knowing which button to press and which caption to pick. if only “we’ll forget we took this” was a choice. instead we picked the most pretentious one. i miss the carelessness in that. i don’t expect that you’ve pinned your copy on the wall like i have. i just hope that you’ve kept it, even if you don’t remember where. but a photo is only half the memory. the other lies in the distant physicality of when we took it. i miss you. every capture is dissolving with us. achromatized by time, the paradox was sly. we tried so hard to catch the moment that it just passed on by.

sometimes you don’t know you’re falling
till the sirens
grow distant. sometimes you feel it
before you even see the cliff or
realize there is one.

people will touch you like
rainfall in the arctic, then
tender you like velvet. incarcerate
you in their arms, obliterate the memory,
then act like you haven’t met yet.

it won’t be easy. you’ll learn that with certain things,
it doesn’t matter how long it lasts,
just that it ends. then
you can wait for the next good thing.

so there will be days when
you announce yourself dead. when
your atoms sink six feet deep.
but be patient for those moments,
though brief and infrequent,
where the scars fall off and
the bruises sleep
and you declare yourself
alive.
then you breathe.
you fucking breathe.

You built me a clock with stationary hands. I asked for a fucking alarm clock and you built me one with stationary hands. And even worse, it still made the ticking sound. And even worse, you called it being thoughtful years later when it came up in an argument. You weren’t being thoughtful, you weren’t being anything. You’re just fucking insane. And detrimental to my sleep. Though mostly insane. Unbelievably, incessantly, and audaciously insane. But I guess that makes the both of us because I learned to loved you anyway. Shit.

there are winters that mend and winters that hurt. but that winter was so terrible we didn’t even try to recover from it. though we should’ve have known. the iron fists, the titan knives, its vicious purpose of beating the peace out of everyone until so much blood was shed it seeped through the frost, then through the asphalt, until we could feel our dna diving within the mantle of the earth. every descending flake shaped like the melancholic howl of a wolf who had just found the lifeless body of his brother. the snow gulped down the pine tree shadows and the cardinals froze mid flight. it was a fiesta of suicide,
of broken veins and hypothermic hands. you know how they say eyes are the windows to the soul? well, we were broken scopes stained red. our spirits shut down every light in our systems, and being numb towards everything but the reverberations of hollow darkness, slept in bitter hope to heal. but i can still feel
the ache in the pits of every laceration on my skin from crawling on all those tapered shards, the tiles covered with skulls split in half, skulls split in fourths, skulls split into million piece, billion piece puzzles, casualties robbed of their extremities, heads and arms and legs sprawled in shapes and directions my coward tongue cannot pronounce.
we were so screwed up that normalcy soon meant a tainted sanity. our heads always avalanched with battered thoughts, we were known as the town of slow decapitation. nothing has ever done us justice so much as that did. it was the winter of no mercy, of carnage that came in swift turbulency.
and that’s how i’m certain that it belonged to me.

We're nothing
but a gathered mass
of mistranslations.
But I've learned
that to misconstrue
is the next best thing
we have
to understanding
each other.

And you're going to wonder how you've managed to be so blind standing in front of someone who's done nothing but tried to make you see.

You should never expect anyone to be anything more than temporary. But you shouldn't treat them like a layover either. Like they are rusted gas stations in the desert, new hope for you to refuel. People are cities. Explore them. Then when it's time to go,
go.

You find confinement in
the damages you've made.
Son, that's not beautiful.
That's plain destructive.
The contrast is in your hands,
so open them.

i went from not sleeping at all
to sleeping in such great portions
that at one point
i expected myself to sleep forever.

but the fear wasn't in never waking up.
the fear was in finding out that
its oblivion still wouldn't have sufficed.
and realizing that even
in the cradle of indelible darkness,
i would still be trapped in
deep morose and discontent
with where i was.
and then, wishing that
i had spent more time with my eyes
wide open.
but knowing that i
never could again.