#rejects-corner

I need you to pinpoint the exact moment the idea of dying became more beautiful than how you felt in mirrors. when your friends and family begun averting their eyes and covering their ears as though your tears were nails down a chalkboard. when every inch of your being first begun to scream at its own existence.  now. dismantle it. tear it to goddamn pieces. know that every breath is a triumph. a victory. and that each beat in your heart is a clenched fist raised to the world as its witness chanting. I made it. I made it. I made it.

Running my fingertips down your spine and across your mouth was the most beautiful way I ever dismantled myself.

It's 6:34 am and their absence has begun to show itself. The first thing you notice is the cold, that uneasy icy chill and the desperate search for warmth that follows. You thrash your limbs about wildly and hope with all of your heart that somehow a hand, a rib, a lip or little toe, will suddenly reach out and softly find yours but deep inside you know it won’t  because now it's only you and that fact alone will freeze your bones a great deal more than the thickest blanket of snow ever could.

I let you go because some ships are not supposed to be anchored at shore  rather when lost, in formless and untameable ocean, they are home.

I have come to learn that there is very little difference between drowning myself in ocean and drowning myself in you. Do you remember the oddly warm night in March we spent sitting and talking of life and love and the state of the world, completely and utterly out of our clothes, half asleep with our lips kissed raw–– the night we promised each other we'd be okay, even if it was only for each other's sake? The night I let my curiosity get the best of me when I turned to you and said, “Tell me– is love supposed to feel like I am struggling for breath––is love supposed to feel like I only have seconds left?” and you replied, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That is everything it is.”

In the gentle epilogue of summer, you and I laid together on the uncut grass of a field by a demolished lot where a house once was. Somewhere, where the wrist bones of maple leaves had begun to weaken, and the grand pianos played out to the applause of bee-wings. Somewhere, where the curves of our feet found each other often and my fingers orbited locks of raven-feather hair like the moon so faithful it spins itself to dust simply to be in the presence of the earth. I told you that it was not important how long this moment lasted, only that it came to pass at all. You wept. A bad feeling crept. Then– as best as I remember this is how it felt: 1. Like I was a star exiled from its own constellation. 2. Like there was a flash flood on the insides of my skin, tearing the suburb of my body to pieces. This is how it felt to learn, that this would be the very last summer you spent with me. See, sickness rarely afflicts those done living. It seems God is an apple-picker who only picks the ripened. And so with fury on my tongue I waved my fists like great flags of war at the heavens above and banished the faith out of my bones. These were the growing pains of the 5 stages of grief. How you offered to carry me when each step forward felt like fiery coals, and how I would walk no more because I could not get my head around the thinking that your wildfire soul could ever be extinguished. This is how it felt to have my heart removed and a harmonica emplaced, tuned to the key of a goodbye-song that goes on for an age. And I had begun to miss you even before your lungs shutdown like a carousal at a carnival, and the evening they did, a dead space was left in me many times greater than all of the black-spots on the outskirts of the galaxy. If I am to be truthful I haven’t been doing all too well lately, and I still sit out on that same field almost daily, beginning and ending each day alone and unsure, because when God took you away, he salted the earth of my heart– now nothing grows here, most especially love.