Ebony-Tiger

The sea is cold, my love I hope you know how to swim I pray your grace and your fortitude Are enough to keep you afloat Buoyant, within reach of air Until your breath finally dissipates And your sounds become silence Who will you become, my darling? Will you hate your compromises? Do you fear your changing mind? We were temple-to-crown once, Hand-in-hand, hips pressed close– Wouldn’t look at you twice now, I know Pretending we were better than our Bared teeth, our bandaged wounds Sold my time to have you Tell me, are you accountable To the self your deathbed keeps? Will you be bolstered or burdened By all those missteps you’ve made? I will be wine-drunk on some balcony Ripping your postcards asunder, Casting them onto shoals, Bidding adieu to you When you go.

She & I were at a baby shower 1.5 years after we had met last (At their wedding, coincidentally) And she asked me how I was doing “I’m alive,” I say by rote at this point Neat little shorthand for abject misery For: it’s 3am again and I’m on the floor ‘what was the point of surviving until now’ and ‘why am I here’ and ‘please make it stop’ Running in my head until the pain takes me under– She told me she didn’t have the right to grieve you either No, that’s not true, I wanna say. Our friend group is fucked. Maybe you and he hadn’t mended your fences yet, but surely– But who am I to inject myself into this? Who am I to demand closure From a tragedy as messy as murder? As sudden as an exsanguination? Who am I to try and soothe her when there’s no comfort to be found at all? I cried on the way home. Watched the fields and imagined seeing your headstone Admitted it hurt when he told me not to come down for your funeral. She understood She always did, I guess. A shame I let stupid shit

i was dripping water all over their hardwood floors shivering and wringing out my hair she was drunk, i think when she pulled me in told me i was a sister to her boyfriend was out in the yard (in his own head still, i guess) tasting like chlorine & booze his sister tugged me out there collecting agreements like seashells reassuring him&me we were lovely– "if you decide to break up you're still a part of this family! and you, sir, you can't say a single word–" heh. earlier, i had watched the trees above me wanted the water to drag me under listened to the laughter and music came up for air instead, yeah, emerged like some sailor fleeing his siren's song. --- at 2:42pm today, i watched the dog play and wondered who'd get my house if i left what would happen to all my little pet clients (how replaceable am i, really?) thought about 2019 and that in-patient psychiatric ward and how unhelpful the people around me were, then how stupid I'd been, to love him to the point of

I. you don’t truly realize its absence until it goes tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock …. it's the scream of a flatline, the final gasp of a body– drawn down into emptiness the absence the fault-line (the before&after)– tick. II. everything that could be formed into beauty and love and wonder are crumbling like sand castles succumbing to the waves shored up by desperate fingers and anguished bargaining, slipping through and vanishing like our dreams, like– like the worlds (we) built on glass leaving us behind it’s as inevitable as inexorable as planets spinning past our reach depositing us back into reality fracturing us into imitations into shadows, pale as snow into sad mimicries we cannot sustain as we painstakingly pick up the pieces– III. I’m asking you this: who could see agony and still decide to turn away? who could still choose the anesthesia of apathy, of closed eyes, the safety of their distance? (even when the calamity is their own, or of their

the mud collects and the branches drip with water that will freeze for all my pain and fortune for everything I could never say oh, I’m still here, unraveling slow eternity is just a breath away it’s close enough to touch on mornings like this and I think of you there on the other side of the veil none of us can break through your closest friends sidestep you but I speak up, refuse the silence the unspoken sorrow, the secrecy and sometimes I can laugh a little can joke about your idiosyncrasies can fight the tears just a little easier but a song, or phrase, or slant of light causes pain to drive me down again, and I'm brought low once more too gone to reach me you’re too cold to hold, slain in your stillness the waters creep and pool reminders I can still feel– & I let them wash me away.

well I held on to let you go can’t keep any of it anymore this is my life and there’s no other way out, no other way to be, no other way to breathe no other way to– I can’t remain like this waiting on what you can’t give me from here on out (split apart as we are) separated until the end– (I miss you, I miss you so much my dreams are drowning under the sound of your voice–) I’ve been sleeping a little better, now I’ve been eating a little more, here I’ve been laughing a little louder– not so scared to be the light in someone’s life oh look at the shape I’m in crying over you buried under bed sheets counting shadows on the ceiling it’s so hard, being warm carrying through persisting so hard, choosing life when death courts me around every corner, watches my every move but I’m here can’t hold this any longer won’t be able to carry this through got a white-knuckled grip on a past I can’t touch I love you. I loved you. I’ll always– I will... you’re a part of

I own this feeling it’ll be mine until the end some things are worth aching for even as they leave you in ruins picking up the pieces, starting anew measuring the worth within and without or after, as I knew you better loved you better than that deserved better than what you got took more than you gave we left each other torn open and angry so certain we were the one could have been we were, once could have been– if we hadn’t been kids so stupid and sorry too deep to see the end too in love to see the fall for what it was, too proud to brace ourselves I didn’t want to open my eyes this morning, wanted my dreams to insulate me from this it’s your birthday today you’ve been in the ground for a month and five days– your twin sister must face today and all the rest of the years without you or your mother here find some way to move without her counterpart her counterweight split in twain– I told my neighbor about you choking back tears, steady in my seat and he tells me he

we’re out of time now you lost yours bleeding out into the carpet of your home I lost mine three days after, and I haven’t been the same since– I'm not really here, see I'm miles and years away measuring power dynamics and all the choices I've made, as if that could make any of this palatable. real. any easier to bear– I keep talking to you in my dreams, so desperate to set all this to rights to try to find a way through this hell some way to look myself in the mirror you hear me out like I knew you would, holding my hand while I cry for everything– I'm a selfish person, we both know that your death is so much more than me and everything I'm contending with your life was your own at this point I had no business asking after you letting you know I still felt love– I wasn't to know if you found others to share your nights and mornings how your twin sister was getting by whether your father had left yet how work was treating you who you hung out with– I wasn't to know if you were

I'm not going to learn anything from this. you'd want me closer, I know. you'd want us to gather in more and share stories, see each other make the drive, take the flight make our new memories, say we love each other– everything you tried so very hard to accomplish while you were alive is happening now, 'cause you left– I'm not going to learn anything from this. he keeps texting me, checking in and we talked about how the grief is making us withdraw from others but here I am now, pulling away (slowly, slowly, and I remember how he took your side, then) I'm not going to learn anything from this. there are three people I have talked to about you one you know, one I'm dating, and one from my elementary school and it does help me not feel so alone but I am alone, I am. I am. I don't want this life as it is now (the world is dark without you here) I don't want to wake up to another day– I'm not going to learn anything from this. I'm caught off-guard by our TV shows, our songs

you’re a drumbeat in the back of my brain two syllables, repeating: rolling off my tongue in those moments where I forget I am alive your name, your voice, your hands the warmth of you, dissipating into open air– (did they catch your blood, hold it in? did they succeed in leading you home?) we were two lost souls swimming in our little circles and I can’t tell anyone who knew you & of you what hell I’m in, here grief is so intimate so isolating I’m alone in this (you’re gone) it’s been three weeks and I’m only halfway here breathing and eating and walking while you’re miles and hours and lifetimes away, some indecipherable chasm yawning between us it’s still not real to me, this isn’t real. I’m not real it can’t be over like this, not like this, no– I keep fixating: did you suffer? were you laying next to a table where you colored with crayons? did you bleed out on a carpet that hosted sleepovers and late-night talks and family gatherings? did you die in front of a TV that held