=Miss-Deathwish

fivethousandfourhundredseventy

-

We used to sit on your porch swing and eat m&m candies together.

You never ate the blue ones, though, because you said that blue was dull and cold, and you’d toss them to the ground.

It didn’t matter that my eyes were blue.

-

You had the prettiest skin, stretched over your body like a translucent sheet.

I could see your veins through it, little blue vines branching beneath its pale cover.

When I told you, you shook your head and said that no, no, your skin wasn’t pretty
because it had been kissed by too many blades and dirtied with too many scars.

I told you that was your fault, though, and you made me leave your room.

-

I asked you what you thought it might feel like to drown.

You said, “Being alone.”

I never told you, but if that was so, then I must have drowned many times over.

No wonder why my lungs always felt like they were about to collapse whenever you weren’t around.

I wondered which I needed more – oxygen, or you.

I picked you.

-

Sometimes you would sing me songs to put me to sleep.

But they weren’t lullabies. They were sad, sad songs about heartbreak and stop signs and shattered vases and icy ocean waves and ripped-up love letters.

When I asked you why you always sang sad things, you said,

“Because they are the only songs I know,”

and I felt something snap in my chest like a rubber band.

-

The day I went home, you placed your lips against my collarbone and gave me a wilted rose. “Sorry it’s dying,” you said, placing the limp flower into my open palm.

“It’s okay,’ I said, but it wasn’t.

I put the rose on my bedside table when I got home, and when I woke up in the morning two of the petals had dried up

and fallen to the floor.

-

Before that summer, I had lived 5,470 days without you.

Since then, I have lived three-hundred-and-something.

It made me wonder if math is wrong, and maybe three-hundred is actually greater than five-thousand.

On my math test, I wrote ‘300 > 5000’.

The teacher marked it wrong.