years change days

this liquid courage makes me nervous stomach twisted and i know the reason hid them in a shoebox when i was 16 been carrying it around ever since it helps to have tangible reminders i tried cutting but found myself too cowardly to lower the blade i still have the scars she doesn’t know i keep them with me always under my clothes cause no one should find out that she was right but she is dead and i am here

sleep threatens sanity and that shoebox sits under my bed full of secrets like when i was 14 i wrote love letters to a girl i’d never meet cause it was easier to feel from a distance never got too close to anyone certainly not myself couldn’t imagine being touched so i smoked cigarettes and wrote suicide notes with the language of an auctioneer a veneer attitude attempting persuasion and mailed them to myself

reminders now they sit in the shoebox on the bottom shelf still waiting but i found someone willing to love me before i owned a winter jacket before i would even say the word love out loud i never looked in the mirror then only saw myself in the destruction i left behind and she has become a part of that devastation i don’t know how to apologize

try not to remember so i don’t answer the phone and move on to another she we had good sex and left it at that maybe we had breakfast once a pre-fuck dinner every now and then but mostly we just had orgasms and that was nice i complicate things but prefer them simple like a pillow of her thighs on a rainy day don’t ask questions dear it only ruins the fun

the shoebox in the closet dispels any myths about my past it was not clean or happy but she did not ask me to be either of those things she didn’t expect me to make sense and i didn’t we drank wine on the stoop and i know we talked a lot but don’t remember what was said i tried to write a love poem and failed like most everyone else luckily it sounded better in bed like most everything else i ran away before i fell in love

women are easy to drive away especially the ones i like try so hard to treat them well and just end up an asshole gotta remember not to end up like those letters in my shoebox the ink on each once-white page faded through the years