Its cold and its dark and im thinking about fathers and what it means to love. Because the first person who taught me the shape of love crushed me in his fist and now im scared that every one i fall for will die with claw marks in their chest. Im worried that i don’t know what it means to love without destruction.

I will cling and i will claw my chest open and ask if you think my lungs are beautiful. I will lie on a concrete floor and bleed and hope it’s pretty. Suffering is like art if you do it right.

Tell me who left first, because in the haze i cant quite remember. If it was you, i forgive you. If it was me, i hope you hate me for it forever.

I’ve spent more years trying to reach into the mirror and reshape my skin even if the broken glass cuts me than i ever did finding it beautiful. And sometimes i look at the blue in my eyes and the scars on my stomach and think “someone could love this” and sometimes i think i’ll only find peace beneath a gravestone.

And if i did, would you write my epitaph? Would it be kind? Would you claw into the stone with your nails and tell the world i lived and someone loved me for it?

Would you forgive me for leaving? It would be easier than forgiving me for what i did to stay.

The strings tying me to life are tangled these days, they fray and twist and tighten around my wrists like restraints.

Sometimes i scream at the sky like it’s my fathers ghost and i ask who i was supposed to be? I ask where are you? Why aren’t you here?

I hate flying. I hate getting too close to the stars.

There are a million poems about people being made out of stardust. Hell hath no fury like a poet with a science metaphor. We love to strip the world bare and claw through the dirt looking for something beautiful. How long have humans stared at the sky and found home? How long have we buried our friends in the dirt. How long have we looked up and down and found more? How long have we traced shapes into the stars and told their stories? When does it end?

Should it?

We climbed our way to the moon and never went back. A checkmark on a list to prove something to a god that doesn’t exist. A challenge. How dare he think anything is out of reach.

The universe is expanding, did you know that? Did you know that every second the edge of life gets further away? There will always be something we can't see. There will always be places we can’t go. There will always be rocks we can’t claim, stick our flag into, and pretend to own.

One day the sun is going to collapse in on itself. Did you know how fragile life is? Did you know we live every day on the precipice of destruction? This is not poetry. There is nothing beautiful about mortality. There is nothing pretty about death. One day the sun will cave in on itself and burn everything we’ve built, one day Ozymandias crumbles to dust. Atlantis sinks. The stars burn out. Checkmate.

We claw life out from the jaws of death and think we’ve won something. We haven’t.

To live is to suffer, did you know that?

I don’t know who im talking to. The sky doesn’t answer your questions. It doesn’t matter how many telescopes you send to ask the stars why we’re here. Sound doesn’t travel in space.

Do you know how much we made out of nothing? How much of our history is purely a riot against insignificance? How much blood spilled, temples built, statues carved, wars fought and lost and won and bones buried to prove we were here? How much of the past is just a teenaged nobody screaming that something happened here, something mattered here. How much time do we spend begging our descendants to listen to us?

There is something violent about fading out of existence. There is peace in it too. Aristotle will never rest, and Shakespeare will be studied by people he never knew until the world ends.

What is more cruel? To be forgotten or remembered?

I don’t know who i’m talking to.

One day the sun will cave in on itself. One day we will fall through a crease in the center of the galaxy. Nothing is immortal. Why do we beg for it to be?

i don't know who im talking to. none of us do.