First

It wasn't the first time I had been doing this. Entering fingerprints into the air that are less mine than they are air but I put them there. So they have to be mine. Inhaling the days away into a dull haze of not being able to care. And then exhaling like I understand something about giving back. Or maybe it's less about giving back and more about watching my breath, leave my body. There's something therapeutic about it and I've learned to need to feel this dying sensation it's the only way I let go because if I do it enough one day it'll kill me. And I'm walking back to this pit of doom I'm asked to attend I'm guided through the hallways by my memorization skills I walk like a zombie on his last leg trying to not starve from all the mind's willful powers. And I'm walking to class a backpack on my shoulder that has more lighters than books and is lighter than any crook in this school. And I sit through lectures and sleep through projects like I know I'm supposed to be listening but I've never really been good at taking orders. So I'm walking through the hall with a target painted like an old shooting range piece of metal on my back asking someone to put it on my forehead and hit me with their car. Because I'm tired of putting a gun in my mouth and not pulling the trigger. I love the taste of the metal but now my teeth are cracked and crooked and one day she walks up to me to talk. I give her a gentle gaze my heart on my sleeve and I'm barely able to keep back, she hits me with a fact, she says,

“You know, that's gonna kill you one day.”

I look up at her with a smirk and a look in my eyes that holds back floodgates of suicidal thoughts.

“Promise?”

I look away like I just broke her gospel but that's when she stops and forgets everything she was saying and whispers,

“Have you seen your smile?”

And before I realize I don't have the heart to tell her I tell her

“no. I haven't.”

And she bends her lips in the way of a “no u-turn” sign without the line through it. And I'm forced to raise my eyebrows like I'm impressed. Her face is kinda like flower petals on a spring day. Calm. But not outrageously calm she still has a hundred problems between her teeth but there's no gap. She never skips a beat and she never yells. And when I hug her she's squeezes half as hard but I feel twice as warm. It feels like home. But I don't know it's home because I've never had one. She's got a spirit I've never seen in my life a glow to her skin that makes me fearful to touch her because what if I burn out the light. What if I break it. She's so soft and for the longest time she was like salvation at the end of a tunnel always in sight but never touchable like God was teasing me with his heart but now she's in my arms I've told her what I love about her face and the 3 years of hell she put me through. No. That I put me through. I was the only one who signed my cast I was the one that put up the sign on the door to my heart that read, “do not touch.” but now she's here standing in my doorway wearing nothing but her heart on her sleeve. Our tattoos match. And there's an endless existence to her eyes they've been burned into my brain. And when she looks at you it feels like you're either a vandal or about to be. And when we’re in a car with the music low wonder fills her eyes and a look I've never figured out how to love before spreads like a dissected heart across her face. So honest. So innocent. Eyes like saturday morning when the sky is robbed of clouds and there’s that humidity that amplifies the sun’s glare so it looks twice as big and a thousand times more beautiful. She’s got this twitch in her fingers that feels scandalous. Like she’s about to steal the green from the grass and the shade from the trees. And when I kiss her I know at some point I had to have been breathing because a few seconds after we let go I remember I have to again. Like oxygen kneels to her. Like she bends the air into a breathing tube and sobers me up in one gaze. I haven’t been smoking lately. And I haven’t felt like killing myself is a race for which i’m going to win some day. Her body temperature lowers my heart rate and her kisses wipe my mind clear. Her breathing feels like an oscillating fan on medium beside your bed to lull you to sleep. And me, I feel like all my pieces are in the right place for once. And we lie in bed like a pair of shoes with scuffs and scratches. And dust settled on the surface. But her left matches my right. And we fall asleep knowing we are the first time we’ve ever done this.