Crush

You smoked menthol cigarettes when I met you.

The kind you crushed.

The kind I didn’t.

The stage returned you to me with stained fingers,

Guitar strings and all those pinched cancer sticks.

Between thumb and finger.

Between breath and silence.

The way I lost my grandma.

The reason my dad gives me shit.

Other than you.

You remind him of someone,

Someone too close to home.

But you’re not him.

You only left because I made you.

He left because growing up is not the dream we think it is.

His dreams were bigger.

You still haunt mine.

Every decision I made was for someone that wasn’t you.

Someone that wasn’t me either.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry that I didn’t see you.

I’m sorry that I didn’t let you see me.

This sounds like a daddy complex,

Written on the back of a suicide note.

It’s neither, or it’s both.

The suicide of some complex that raised me in absence,

The death of some guilt I don’t deserve.

There is no hate here.

There is only me.

Abandonment issues have all run out.

Self-loathing has come to hate the concept of massocism more than I have ever despised myself,

Or you.

I’m letting go of everything,

except the need to hold on,

To you.