because i couldn’t get out the other eight
1:
I miss you.
I miss the way you say my name,
Just that hint of accent still kicking around.
The way you would have helped me know what to wear on the first day of grad school.
And be quiet, when I needed, while I cried.
Told me about some new $300 kitchen thing you don’t need, a better version of my Midwest hand-me-down crockpot and crochet oven mitts.
Why couldn’t you have loved me as a friend?
Why couldn’t you keep me?
Why did you have to cut me off and wait for your feelings to go away?
Why did you have to do what I did to you?
Why couldn’t you have just put me first?
Even said there was potential to put me first.
So I could have stayed. So I could have loved. And gotten to ride in your car one more time.
Hear the gear shifts through the iPhone mounted to your vent.
Made you hike in the woods in your good shoes at dusk.
Made you laugh, and shake your head, and gotten distracted in a work meeting,
Just the once more.
So I’d feel like I still have my friend.
And I’d feel like I didn’t do something wrong.
2:
Please don’t kill yourself this Christmas.
Don’t do it for me,
For my entirely selfish reasons.
I want to know there’s someone in a worse place than me,
So I can feel better about myself.
I need that someone with a darker sense of humor,
So I can still be surprised by jokes darker than death.
I want to feel like I’m bad, but at least I’m not that bad.
I want that illusion that I can help someone who needs it,
Bring food to the needy, have a purpose, keep you alive.
I want to have that edge that says, yeah I have a suicidal friend, but I’m helping her through it.
How cool is that?
I don’t want to be the kid in class who has an edgy reason to be late on her chapter summary.
I want to hear more weird german words, to remind me there’s more to learn.
I want to hear your impossible to hear voice over the phone.
I don’t want another cause I have to take up because another one of my friends died because of it.
I don’t have that kind of time.
I don’t have time to grieve you this year.
Wait just a minute or two, okay?
I would have to meet your family at the funeral, and they sound like total assholes, who wants that?
Some Bad Plankton 