sleepy

1. Seeing blood on your own hands doesn’t make you a poet 2. Kiss the boy you know won’t call you back, don’t cry when he doesn’t call you back 3. It’s pointless to cover your scars with long sleeves and band-aids and bad excuses 4. Bad things have good aim. Don’t think the horrors in the world won’t hurt you. You’re gonna get shot in the heart 5. Remember that one of these days you’re going to have to face death a million times, your mom won’t live forever and neither will your friends or your little brother 6. Drinking too much isn’t even fun. You just feel sick 7. Take a lot of pictures because soon you’ll be thirty-five and you won’t remember who you were at fifteen; you were so much sweeter at fifteen 8. Don’t pick flowers 9. I used to fall in love so I had a reason to kill myself when it didn’t work out, don’t do that to yourself or your mom 10. Don’t kill yourself 11. You don’t have to have a relationship with your parents. Blood isn’t love 12. You don’t have to be in love with yourself 13. Don’t tell your boyfriend your lucky number, he’ll jinx it when you break up 14. Try not to hurt other people, you’ll get splinters in your fingers if you’re always breaking bones 15. Put yourself first and learn how to stop bleeding on your own, without band-aids or boyfriends.

When I was little I was terrified of forgetting. I wrote down the last words my mother said to me before she went to sleep every night: “Goodnight baby” “You have an early morning tomorrow” “Goodnight I love you” “Make sure you turn off your light” “See you in the morning” and in second grade I got accused of cheating because the girl sitting next to me caught me writing down that weeks spelling words in my folder as they spilled from my teacher’s mouth: “Leader” “Whisper” “Balance” “Reflect” “Steady” I wasn’t cheating I was just terrified that I would forget the words that were disappearing in the air When I was in third grade I made valentine hearts for all my classmates and made my mom take a picture of all 23 of them so I wouldn’t forget what they looked like Every time we stayed in a hotel I cried the day we left because I was scared I would grow up and forget the long hallways or the color of the unfamiliar comforter or the memories behind that key-card door And now I’m older And I’m scared of remembering I don’t want to remember the way I felt when I wanted to die or the way you looked at me when you said, “I love you but I fucked someone else.” I don’t want to be haunted by ghosts of bitten off fingernails or bleeding gums. I want to forget you and the way you used your hands like guns.

I hope that when we break up our love is like your old favorite song, something your forget but for some reason you still smile when your mom hums it in the car.

1. In one universe only the two of us can breathe underwater and the bottom of the ocean is where we first said “I love you” 2. In another, time resets and we fall for each other all over again every time 3. We are flowers growing alone on opposite sides of the field but a little girl and her mother pluck us from our homes and put us in a vase where we wilt together 4. Here, the sky changes color and you can touch each other through the wind so every time I feel a breeze on the back of my neck I know it’s your mouth and I smile, you feel the wind whistle through your teeth 5. This universe we were the same age. We learned to drive at the same time and spent hours driving to see each other even just for one night and never minded radio station static or the way your back always starts to ache in the car 6. We grew up together, you lived down the street, running down hills together and holding hands when it snowed. You were there when I turned six. You were there when I turned sixteen. You loved me the whole time. 7. You never kissed that girl, I wasn’t scared of heights. Your parents didn’t fight, I wasn’t so far away. We both got enough sleep. 8. We never screamed “I hate you” at each other that one night when we fought over dinner at your older sister’s house. We never forgot that we loved each other. 9. We could live in outer space. We bought our own star and always took pictures of each other to hang on the walls. You never got tired of me. We could breathe there in a way we never could here 10. You only lived an hour away instead of the other side of the world. I never cried. Neither of us knew what tears tasted like.