january 3rd 2024

i’ve decided i must work through this before i see you again. i return to campus on january twelfth. for two and a half years you have haunted me, but in this season i spend probably six hours a day in a pool of thought. my mind works in poems, i write without writing, i weave you together and apart. i don’t know how much of you is real anymore, or rather a fabrication across distance—always characters with me, you’d laugh if you knew. i read my own cards and i’m meant to forget, to erase you. i do not know how to be.

i’m just by the edge, but peering over my stomach turns and only snotty vomit takes the fall to the concrete. i remember how you passed me a plastic bag when i greened out at one in the morning and then you sat in the corner with your knees to your chest as i released it. this year i called you my sponsor so when we ended you kept my things in your desk like it still meant something, some desperate insistence of loyalty. you don’t want me to die. ironic how you’re planting a silver bullet square in my head. don’t you know your indifference is terminal? 

your plane’s catching on fire and once, you thought about saving yourself. but you’d rather tend to the wing for as long as you can, and with your ash-burned eyes you’ll take final refuge in the cockpit to lick your wounds and pray. and while you’re tumbling down you might call to me, and you’ll say i’m sorry. for everything ever. and you’ll tug on my cord and i’ll open, your haniel, and carry you to lovely ground, as you designed me. upturned death: will you reach for me again? or will i leave you there in the sky? or will you leap from the hatch door, wild, unsecured, and kill yourself proudly? 

and when they find the black box i’ll be there with it / sinking and kicking as i go