Just one step you coax and I’m watching
Yet I can’t move forward like my legs are made of solid glass
And weighted with needle pin stones
And one move will shatter you.
Red lipstick promises remind me that I never loved you
Yet I’m still stuck here in this factory town
And my lungs are made of smoke instead of love.
My heart is blue, bruise-blue
The only blue you ever see on skin
Like water tainted with lust.
Now sugar tastes like missing you.

You liked used-book stores because they smelled like home.
Your mother never ate dinner with you
So you sat alone and the chairs became your family.
Your mother broke your sister in a drunken rage once.
You found god once.
You said he was on a street corner waiting for the bus in the rain.
He told you it was hopeless.
Your scars never healed across your face and your back
Where the angels tore out of you and left you empty.

Dead eyes stared at me when we sat across the dinner table
And you tried to pass that lonely smile off for romance.
You just tried to be the figment of my mind
And my God you tried.
But still I kept believing that it was a lie
When you talked about dying like it was your grand purpose.
You kept telling me you’d forget how to breathe
And your favorite moments were the ones just before your lungs opened up again Because those were the moments you knew
You could just close your eyes and be gone forever.

I miss the way you hummed when you thought no one was listening
But I was, every time.
I think at some point you realized
But you kept humming until one day became the last day.
We used to say that they should build monuments to us
Because we were perfect
But one night you said that we were monuments
To everything that’s wrong with the world.

I think suicide is contagious because I caught it from you.
And now I can’t stop thinking that
Life is just an endless path to wherever you are now.
I wish it were because then I would tell you that I don’t forgive you
And I never will because you sang me to sleep
And now my eyes won’t close and music sounds like endings.
When people stare I stare back and when they ask I keep staring
Because they’ll never know.