We were kissing each other’s memories as if they were scars
This is brutal
Just one big tangle of broken down cars and late nights and hating your guts

You’re holding my hands
This was all some strange dance of muscles that I’ve never seen before but could somehow execute flawlessly
You were staring straight into my eyes and I still missed you
Not like you were running too fast,
But I ached like you fell into ashes without even a fire for me to grieve

When we kissed, I went home and cried

So this hurts
This hurts like loving a child you can’t have
Or watching your garden die
Or ripping out an IV when you’re having a nightmare
I needed that IV

This time, when your heart aches
When you’re kissing me but you’re not in love
When you leave for work in the morning without saying good bye...
I’m sorry, I can’t do this

You were not something broken for me to piece back together
And I was not something fragile for you to break

When I was in love, it killed me
And now that I’m not, all I do is sit here,
Tearing my ribcage open
When I was dying, I saw angels

I was bleeding
I can barely remember, but it usually goes something like this
You were a little too late,
And just not sorry enough
So I let go of the arm of the sofa
I woke up in your bed
The only scars on my arm were lipstick stains

We’ve been living in the right lane of the highway
Going way too fast way too carefully
I think we missed our exit but I know that we missed everything in between
But honestly,
I think the whole world is right here, in the cab of your beat up pickup truck

If this is love, then I think writers got a little confused
This is confined, and nuanced, and breakable
There is no indestructible rope tying us together
Our love is trapped inside a glass prism
All you have ever needed to do was knock it off the shelf
But that doesn’t mean it was any less beautiful in one piece

You need to learn a lesson
Girls in short skirts and tall heels will not dance with you
They will fix their lipstick and take pictures for the internet
But they will not move any further into the party
The dance floor is lava and you are children
Your love is an ocean and she is a hot air balloon
You will never reach her
And she will never fall into that

But it got your imagination going
Some rusty old gears that you thought had fallen apart
And that makes it worthwhile, right?
Or maybe it doesn’t
Maybe it rots your insides until your soul melts out your eyeballs and you fall apart for real this time
Maybe it makes a pin ***** scar that you’ll have to explain to somebody someday

But honestly, if we left hand prints on beaches or carvings in trees,
I think we’d be wasting our lives
I have never regretted taking out my camera
Because nothing is permanent, but you can last for as long as I carefully back-up my memory card

If this is what she considers "feeling alive," I think she's got it a little mixed up
See, I understand skydiving, once or twice
But she's driving too fast just to get to work in the morning

She would have done anything to get high and not lose her job
And that is the exact reason they drug test dead-end cooperate desk jobs
So instead, she stays up late watching cooking shows
She tried painting her nails and cutting her hair but she's still exactly where she started

See, we were wrong about how many of us would grow up to be doctors
Some of us were relieved and some got bored
But almost none of us could afford med school
She goes for runs, eats too much ice cream, takes vacations
But she's never coming back

1.
Let's install some fail-safes
You have to convince yourself that this is really what you want
If you aren't gay, pretend you are
If you are gay, pretend you're not
I guarantee you will not fall in love

2.
Pick the sweetest person
Someone your parents will approve of
Someone who is so perfect for you that you just don't understand why you're sitting alone right now
If you're not voted cutest couple for the yearbook, you can't possibly be in love, right?
Too many people are watching

3.
Try to love them
Try to give yourself a textbook relationship
Go on dinner dates
And watch scary movies so you can cuddle up together
Argue about why you should definitely pay "because it's romantic"
Blow out the candle when she's not looking

4.
Stop taking off work on Friday nights
It was never going to work, anyway, so why bother getting attached?
When you realize that they love you,
And you are still sitting there alone, that's when your heart breaks
When you realize you can walk away and be unchanged
Because how could you possibly walk away from two entire years with another human being and not feel something
Your heart's going to break anyway, just because it didn't.

"But what if we're wrong?"
It was silent
But her thoughts echoed around in my head as we laid on top of her pickup truck
I swatted at the eighteenth mosquito chewing on my leg
I don't want this to be love

We were tangled up in the acoustic music they play on the radio on Sunday mornings
She was trying to dream up something clever to write about
And I was pretending I could learn to play guitar through osmosis,
As if blending myself in with the harmonies, finding her in every lyric, and sheer willpower would give me wings or at least magic guitar hands

She set the alarm, checked it over and over
She was not going to be late for her first day
I told her I'd be asleep when she got home, she told me she knew
I told her to wake me up

I wasn't looking for perfect
Perfect really only applies in first year physics courses
After that, we learn to fall in love with "rough around the edges" or "unique" or "unfinished"
As if their life is a puzzle that we need to complete
Just so you know, it isn't

She bought me breakfast and dropped me off
She used to tell me she loved me, but I know she didn't
She does now, so she doesn't have to say it anymore
When I said, "love," before, I didn't really mean it
Not like I mean loving the garden on the balcony of her apartment or thunderstorms in May
Even if I was a puzzle that she completed (and I'm not saying that I am), we didn't need any glue to fit perfectly

The graffiti on the bathroom stalls has been blotted out by butterflies
The world is taking back it's body
Bringing back old fashioned Roman  concrete to fill in all the cracks

She's taken apart the locks just in case something beautiful got trapped inside
Every safe is a time capsule
Curiosity isn't dangerous anymore

Every time she took a step, the air shuddered
The soles of her shoes grew roots and flew away
She was humming and fixing things as she went with just the soothing sound of her sanity
Her soul leeching out like an ethereal mechanic

There were wishing flower seeds mixed in with the strawberries she was picking
I think when she ate them, she became holy
Her hands stroked the wind as they fell to her sides,
Like running her fingers through horse hair

At first, she made the mistake of falling in love with elevator buttons
Up, or down, one or the other, in constant motion
When they cut her open, she bled ivy
She invaded their circuitry and rotted their robotic
She showed them alive and showed them the door

She didn't understand wildfires
She knew passion only by its name,
Only by the monuments, by the mountains, and trenches
By the continents drifting like ice in lemonade
"You can't ruin this," she said

And if this is what burnt out looks like,
Imagine what will happen when the meteor hits
Or the bombs go off, or the oceans flood
This isn't a project we can procrastinate on
These are our wide open spaces and final frontiers

See, the world is taking her body back
Bandaging the scars we left,
Quietly, behind us, when we aren't looking
She's reinventing herself
Just like a garden,
Just like a caterpillar,
Just like a star we couldn't give up on
And we're all standing here, shouting, "We can change-"
We can change.