"time for the quarterly internet rabbit-hole of your early life.

are you going to spend the next hour looking for pictures of an old mall?

or by finding out the real reason why the first movie theater burned down eleven years ago?

or perhaps look at how your favorite grocery store has changed?

how about we look at the once empty fields that are now occupied by mattress stores?

then will you end it by crying yourself to sleep?
wondering why you cannot remember any of it all?
why you cannot make sense of being a child?
did you ever become conscious before 2012?
are all these hazy memories just dreams?
did you even exist in any of it?



what are you even searching for?"



anything.

i found myself stuttering over your name in conversation

it was almost two months ago

although i keep wondering if it happened for a reason
maybe to prevent the eventual sobbing that night
doesn't mean i don't kick myself for it

i constantly feel the weight of your ghost
maybe it's selfish of me to notice the consistency of you
or to assume it is always you

or is it low of me to think that you wouldn't be there

i've held onto this thought since july

and i'm just angry you're dead

i want to write of you
but i cannot bring myself to finish anything i say
writing about grief through grief
is hard

and you would think that it would be easy
since i've been writing for years
i hate leaving things unfinished

i try not to think of it often
maybe that's the problem

i freeze when i do

i think we were destined from the first time i heard you speak
a rough but gentle voice you carry
and i hope you know it carries me

i feel i've known you for ages
even though it's only been a short while
sometimes i wish i could meet you all over again

you're a rush of air
something i've needed for so long
sometimes it's so hard to breathe around here

in such a way that seems elementary
i want to write the loveliest things about you
i want to put them in the sky

but in the same way
i want nobody to know
i want to go with you wherever you slip away to

and i want you to slip away to me
i want to be that embrace that let's you know you're home
because you let me know the same

the longest road is the one you keep looking back on
the longer you stare
the more it stretches

it seems that the roads i walk have the most rigid bones
the ones that can't quite stretch to that spot
such an ache that i feel it in my own bones

the fact that you're no longer alive
grasps me in the strangest moments
and those bones come through the dirt to hold onto me

they remind me that i too
am in constant ache

i.
i've met god
he's lying six feet deep
in the rare greens of chicago
where the trees make up for the emptiness
the loss
the silence

the grass seems so frightening for its purpose
but yet so full and comforting
i don't blame the slumber

i blame the normality of it all

there is this soft innocence when the sun rises
when your mind is at its weakest
eyelids heavy
bearing the burden of the past
and its memories

the most pure is the softest light
that the sun can bestow onto you

a gentle reminder that the day is new
even when all the days seem stagnant
and sleep is but a distant task