I skipped the last day of high school to go to your funeral.
If you were here, you’d drive to the parking lot
of our high school and wait like I did for you
that march morning when the white lines were
tear stains on the asphalt, frames for crushed cans,
a balance beam between ignorance and hindsight,
call it gravity, then. Call it fate, pull the strings
to give us back the graffitied textbooks and the
mildew fertilized by poverty. I want to live and
die in the stiff, cold desks: the place I met myself.
You never got to see your face reflected in black tiles,
the loneliness of being muted by a person you’ve never met.
The comfort of the cemetery, because I am as close to you
as I am to anyone else.
I wish I was writing this in cursive, in person.
Applied knowledge of a mundane skill.
Bold on the down strokes, something to
burn through paper because I haven’t bought
gasoline for months.
The note we left on shook on its staff, it faltered,
creating dissonance with every word I played it with.
graduation. college. safety. normalcy.
I shudder at the cacophony from my dorm room.
