I miss you the way a blade misses flesh.

I miss my friend who chose a door I couldn’t walk through.

 

I hate that you never crawled to me bleeding.

I hate the soft, stupid animal inside me that didn’t smell the rot.

​

You selfish fucking coward.

You elegant, theatrical thief of air.

 

I cradled your mother while she shattered into wet pieces.

Your little brother looks at me like I held the rope.

 

The funeral was obscene in its politeness.

Your gravestone sits smug and tasteful—

a single pretty lie among the clichés.

I still can’t go.

The cemetery air would choke me with what’s left of you.

 

I keep replaying the dumb videos you sent at 3 a.m.,

the ones that were never funny to anyone else.

Now they feel like evidence I should have decoded.

Every laugh we ever shared is a nail under my tongue.

 

Some nights the floor tilts hard

and joining you stops sounding like surrender—

it starts sounding like justice.

But even that small mercy I deny myself.

Your poison stays mine.  

I won’t let it leak onto anyone else’s skin.

 

Why the fuck did you make me the one who found you?

Why arrange the scene for my eyes only?

Fifteen minutes I spent shoving life back into a body  

that had already decided I wasn’t worth staying for.  

One flat syllable from a cop’s mouth  

and the whole world went monochrome.

 

Your mother’s scream wasn’t human.

It was the sound of God changing His mind too late.

 

That noise carved a permanent room in my skull.  

I rent it out to silence every night.

 

They tell me I’m young.  

New friends grow on trees, apparently.  

They don’t understand that my first real friend  

didn’t just leave—he evacuated,  

taking the only version of me that wasn’t ruined.

 

I know the textbooks say I’m not to blame.  

Textbooks have never tasted CPR that failed.  

Never smelled the copper change in the air.

 

I should have answered that call.  

I should have answered that call.  

I should have answered that fucking call.