She says you’re a ghost, You haven’t cut holes through a white sheet And thrown it over your head just yet But you think you might understand what She means exactly When she’s been gone for three months And you walk into your kitchen except you don’t. You’re lying on the couch feeling her Absence harder than when you first left. You think of her but maybe you don’t You wonder how she had the nerve to call you A ghost When she was the one who was buried in the end.

Saturday morning. She has ink-stained lips, and you? You have tea scalding your throat. It burns when you drink it, just like when she said, “I just want to be friends.” You couldn’t hold her hand in public or kiss the taste of berries from her lips when you were at her house. She always said ‘not here, not now’ Like you were a skeleton in her closet The only thing hiding in her closet was Her.

god please tell me how do i reinvent myself | anxiety shakes my bones and loneliness has a way of rooting itself inside of me and never dying | god tell me why the lonely doesn't die even though i want to | tell me why it is hardest to breathe at night | god please tell me why the sunlight scalds my skin | is it because i am laced with constellations and my flesh is born from the moonlight | god tell me how do i reinvent myself when all that happens when i try | all that happens when i try is nights spent catching tears in the palms of my hands and cutting the stardust from my skin | is it possible for the broken to repair themselves into someone new | god please i am asking for a friend.

There is a story inside of me waiting to come out, stardust pouring from the open wounds in my wrists that were carved with a knife. Words and tales are trapped inside my shaking form. I am made up of my mother’s trust issues and my father’s inability to love, and while she has very few friends, he has the habit of never texting back. I have no friends and I never text back, and I wonder if my parents were the reason for the insecurity that has suffocated me or the hands that push me under the waves. I say I’m scared of suffocating but I am more scared of drowning in my sadness. Please don’t leave me here without a life jacket but please do not fish me out, I won’t ask for you to save me but I also won’t save myself.