the sky is beautiful, he thinks as he falls.

maybe it’s never been this beautiful before. maybe he’s going crazy because he’s about to die. isn’t his life supposed to flash before his eyes? all he’s seeing is an endless blue. a blue so wide it could consume him -- and he supposes, soon, it may as well.

he never knew it could take so long to fall. it’s as if life itself is holding its breath, waiting for the moment where it ends. will he stain this beautiful sky when he hits the ground? will it bleed red and never stop, or will it blink once and move on, never to think of him again?

he’s definitely going crazy.

but when else is he going to go crazy? for fucks sake, he’s going to die. god, he’s going to die.

he’s going to die and all that’s going to see is this blue, blue sky, and there’s a saying about trees in the forest and if they really make a sound, but when he dies, if no one sees, will he ever have even existed at all? if all that knows him is this sky, will that be what he becomes?

where do we go when we die? he never believed in reincarnation before, but right now, the sun is angled perfectly to reflect circles of light in his vision, and the sky is so far away and yet so close he could reach out and touch it, and the clouds are making way as if heaven itself will open to take him in, and he’s wondering what part he’ll be when he’s gone. the rays of light, the clouds above, the endless sky?

nothing at all?

he hits the ground.

did you hear him?

how does a ghost love?

he takes your hand in the dark when you lay down to sleep,

he watches over you to keep you safe.

when the sunlight pours in, it melts away the traces

of all the battles he fought for you.

and you cannot find him,

in the creases of your sheets

or the gentle press of your feet against the carpeted floor.

so how does a ghost love?

he holds your hand, but you cannot feel it;

he keeps you safe, but you never know it;

he is always with you, but you cannot see it;

so he tells you he loves you

in flowers left at your doorstep,

in chocolates hidden in your desk drawer,

in post-it notes on your walls to tell you how wonderful you are.

he needs no tangible body, so long as he is full to the brim with love.

but how does a ghost love

when he's stuck on a different side of existence?

oh, dear, he is so enamored with you,

he whispers praises at your feet and you cannot hear it,

his eyes shine when you sing and you cannot see it,

never has such deep love been given, for you to be unable to feel it.

can you see his fear? do you know his worries?

he loves you, you cannot tell;

so he will do his best to make it clear.

how does a ghost love?

don't worry about the blood on your walls;

it's just a sign of his affection.

don't be scared of the ones who go missing around you;

he'll make sure you're never one of them.

monsters have always existed in your life,

don't you know he's just protecting you from them?

the way he protects you in the night,

from spirits of vengeance that feed upon your dreams.

indeed, this is how a ghost loves,

with desperation, with adoration, with obsession, with manipulation.

he needs you; he'll do anything for you,

but you could never tell, so he made it clear.

now you can finally see him in the mirror's reflection.

you can finally feel his chilly hands taking yours in the night.

you can finally hear him, and he is saying

"come join me, my dear. come join me.

together, we'll learn how ghosts love."

you're not good at goodbyes, you say

they make you sad,

because you hate to see something end.

but not everything culminates with a final goodbye.

some are just a final conversation,

a moment of passing in the hallway,

and then you never pass by them again.

today, i'm scrolling through meaningless conversations,

the ones you didn't know would be the last,

the times you didn't say goodbye, but it did end.

the missed friendships,

the possibilities, slipped away forever.

it's so simple --

one text, one message, and perhaps it could come back.

maybe it's saveable.

but you don't know,

because too much time has passed,

and you don't know who they are anymore,

or if they'll like who you are now;

and that ending was so unremarkable.

as if it never meant anything --

but, surely, it did

you weren't best friends,

they didn't shape your life,

but by god, it did mean something. it must have meant something.

it always means something;

everything always means something.

because you met them,

because you sent those last "hey"s and "hello"s and "how are you"s,

before finally it was over.

with one last inconspicuous conversation, one last attempt,

a bit weak, a bit short,

but an attempt.

not everything in life can last,

not every person can stay forever.

but you can't help but wish, right?

because what if one day, you're standing in a coffee shop,

and you meet eyes with someone across the room;

or you're running late at your university,

and you bump into someone on your way;

or you get a new job,

you move to a new state,

you're waiting in the airport,

you attend a friend's wedding;

and somewhere, somehow, you see a familiar face.

and you think --

"i knew you once."

can i ever know you again?

i am thinking about the world.

i am thinking about the beauty of the world,

how fragile such a thing is.

this world is beautiful; it was made beautiful

it was made to flourish with life

and it was made to let life flourish.

perhaps we, too,

were made to be beautiful.

and that is the tragedy of the world,

for we are no longer beautiful;

we are killers and monsters and soldiers and lonely broken hearts standing hand in hand,

reveling in how unbeautiful we have made the world.

breaking apart before the ugliness we've birthed of our ugly hearts.

it is not inherently evil to be human,

but humanity has within it an inherent evil.

and it is not each person waking up to their own day,

and yes, you may meet a friendly neighbor,

you may love a gentle soul,

you may help your friends through pain,

you may be a good person.

but the better you are, the more it hurts,

the more beautiful you are, the more the ugliness hurts.

because you know you cannot save it,

you love this world and you cannot save it,

because there is ugliness in your own human race,

and now the world is dying at their hands.

the world is beautiful,

oh, how it is beautiful,

and i will be remembering its beauty in its last moments,

and that is why it hurts more to be alive now than ever before,

because the world is dying and we can really, truly see it,

because beauty turns ugly at the hands of human hatred and we can see it,

because i love this world and i cannot save it and i can see this,

because once, at the inception of the universe,

there may have been one single world -- perhaps just one single world --

chosen for life,

for all of this beauty.

perhaps we're only the last,

and if we're lucky, we're only the first,

but maybe,

just maybe,

we are the only ones.

maybe this is all the life in the entire universe,

all the beauty is on this world,

and we have killed it because we cannot stand to be beautiful,

we want everything to be beautiful and yet we cannot stand to be beautiful.

and this is the only truth i know:

that the powerful and hateful are simply blind to beauty,

and if not for them, the world could have been beautiful.

we could have been beautiful.

you refuse to let yours be a pointless existence

and so you will do anything, fight everything

you fear fading away, having never even lived

so you swear the world will remember you,

and you rush into the fray.

well, they remembered you indeed --

but was it worth the price?

your lover stands at a grave,

holding your weapon in their hand.

you abandoned them on this earth,

because you needed to leave a legacy

now they wear it upon their neck like a chain

a reminder of your life

a reminder of your desperation.

who lives when you die,

when you write yourself into history?

was a legacy in eternity better than a lifetime in their arms?

have consideration, my dear and reckless hero

being remembered means so much less when you're gone

and the ones who remember you in truth,

in who you were and how you lived,

are not those who read your stories --

it is those who beheld your desperate rush into your demise

and prayed that you would hold still,

for just a moment

and live with them

rather than live by dying.

it is always broken hearted heroes

and breaking into pieces;

nothing but tragedies piling up to olympus’ peak.

do you hear the whispers?

the cries echoing up from the river styx

the begging, the pleading --

“bring him back to me,”

“let me see her again.”

“where have they gone?”

“where do i go?”

but though they cry,

no longer heroes as much as abandoned, lonely soliloquies,

no one will ever respond. no god, no savior, no forgiving entity -- indeed, no hero will come.

for in wishing for a hero,

you wish for another’s demise.

“name one hero who was happy,”

said achilles,

because he knew how deeply tragedy ran in a hero’s blood

and he claimed it would not run in his,

only to lose it all in the end. to lose him --

and he was everything.

“show me a hero,

and i will write you a tragedy.”

but why is that --

why is it always tragedies?

it seems to be a hero is to be sworn to tragedy,

to be fated to a loveless, hopeless end,

abandoned by the world, by the gods,

lost in the underworld, separated from your love --

from the only person or people or whatever it may be that you truly needed to save. the only being that could have saved you.

do not write me another tragedy;

i have seen far too many.

write me the love, the happy ending --

abandon the world if you must.

do what it takes, or let our heroes do what it takes,

to have what they love,

to finally be the ones who are saved.

if a hero cannot be both happy and a hero,

then let us throw the idea of heroes aside.

just for one happy ending,

for one eternal love.

let orpheus turn and see eurydice right behind him;

let achilles and patroclus win the war together.

give these heroes the ending of eros and psyche --

soul and desire, bound to one another fatefully.

for once, let melpomene cast aside her mask of tragedy;

the muses shall sing of a happy ending.

of two lovers, hand in hand --

heroes no longer.

the world does not end

quite the way people expect it to.

there is no final, powerful destruction,

no singular overwhelming power come to consume life.

though really,

what does it mean to end?

for humans, the end of the world is the end of our existence

but something may remain even when we are gone.

when the quiet came --

that very loud quiet which overcame all,

which gradually,

almost gently

and yet oh so cruelly

took everything away --

when it came, it sucked away life

by feeding on the hatred that humans created.

indeed, it did devour existence,

turned the grass to ashes and the air to poison,

but it was so slow,

so unnoticeable,

the way everything fell before our very eyes,

beneath our own feet,

and all by using the hands that humanity granted to it.

yet if anything could remain,

if any small sprout or newborn cub

could have survived the world's slow death,

then perhaps even the word 'end' would be a temporary term.

but as for humanity,

we would never be there to know.

i plant flowers

for you

carefully, gently,

i pour into them

my memories of our time together:

red roses, for the feelings we bore

carnations, for my adoration for you

austrian roses, for you are all that is lovely,

and i oft found myself lost in your beauty.

your gentle hands

tended to the garden of our love

and now my own hands

tend to this garden of flowers.

each flower speaks your name,

as i tell them to when i plant them.

i let them grow beautiful and bright

let them feel the warmth of the sun

and when my garden is completely grown,

i let them

die.

i plant flowers

for you

all so that

they can wilt

the way that i wilted because of you.

indeed, your gentle hands

tended to our garden --

but were you just too clumsy?

i suppose our flowers were

too fragile

for you.

so now i plant my flowers

with my own clumsy hands

and i tell them,

“when you die,

cry out this name.”

so you will know

that it’s all your fault.

everyone says they wanna die

but i know they just don't wanna live

and what kind of messed up world is this --

that everyone's dying and saying it's okay?

i think we got on the wrong path,

think we took a wrong turn

but i don't know if there's a way back,

maybe this is already the end.

welcome to the broken generation:

we don't know how to live but we're sure as hell tryin'

and maybe this is wrong but we don't know anything better

fighting gods like we're kings,

but we're just desperate to stop all this dying.

everything is falling apart and

i feel like the whole world is crying but

we're just trying to heal,

holding onto sinking lifeboats

she says she's just surviving;

i tell her there's a difference between alive and actually living

he says that this is happiness;

i tell him not even pills are gonna heal you

they say that everything is going to be okay;

i tell them our scars are saying otherwise.

i want to save but i'm still waiting to be saved

wonder if my life was over before it even began

and i hate how beautiful the world is,

and how hateful humanity makes it.

i hear her voice, she tells me she's dying;

i say i'll try and help her, but we both know i'm still drowning

and truth is i'm scared of letting go,

cause what if i was never holding on at all?

so save me a grave right next to yours

i'll meet you down in the dirt

and everything ends, nothing's eternal

but life is everlasting, we'll be immortal

even after we die.

yeah, they've left us for dead,

but we just wanna live

so if there's somewhere left, take my hand;

maybe we can find a resting place

to lay down these weary souls.

cause we're just kids

with the weight of centuries on our shoulders;

let's turn our backs on history,

turn our backs on the present,

we'll create something that exists outside of time.

hey there.

how are you?

we haven't spoken

in so long.

hey there.

anything new with you?

it's weird, isn't it --

writing to you when you're already gone.

hey there.

i miss you.

sorry, i know i shouldn't say that.

(but i'm always thinking of you.)

hey there.

i'm sure this is getting old for you.

but i just can't stop;

i just can't forget.

hey there.

there's something i'm too scared to say to you.

so i keep my poems short: only four lines

that way i don't have to say the truth.

hey there,

i can't erase the past.

wish i could, but

it's all we're left with now.

the past, and the memories, and

the feeling of your warmth, somewhere in my chest, and --

i know we can never go back.

we can never be together again.

but slowly, slowly, i'm able to say that i've accepted it.

maybe i haven't really, but

i'm a writer, so

i'll bleed our story onto these pages.

and with each and every word

with every set of four lines

it hurts a little less.

and now,

this will be the last one.

so i'll say it

the way that i know best.

hey there,

i loved you.

i love you.

goodbye.