Young and Aspiring.

I thought that I had found the words to encapsulate those moments in which I catch myself hearing the applied numbers to days and drop all moments of now and sacrifice them to the before. But I cannot. I cannot explain how deep this concept of nostalgia sets in when I see photographs of myself in a place where you were not, when I had wished nothing more than your presence intertwined with mine. I cannot help but align the birth of a poet to the birth of you, the death of a poet to the birth of us, or words I struggled to scrawl across paper as I suffocated attempting to breathe in the only air I had remaining. I do not know how to tackle this internal battle between recreating attachments to material things versus appreciating the links that have remained, heldfast over time.

I want to loathe it. I want to rip it apart from the seam of its sticky and feed it into an abyss where I won't ever have to face it again. My stomach cannot stomach the taste, so I wish to leave the digesting to those who stumble upon the words I neglected to address. I had always spoken of a white flag and the height at which I held it for the sake of following you into the dark in a somewhat less blinding fashion. Like maybe, perhaps, possibly, somehow the white from the flag would run just a bit and sink, seep, set into the curves of my knuckles and aid in my fight against the darkness. But the only flag I hold between my fingertips is obnoxiously red, standing tall with little assistance, and creating distance between the words I finally regurgitated from a sickened stomach that you created and the ears that they fell upon.

These words are trite. These words don't elaborate. These words just aren't enough.
I am scraping out my insides until my nailbed aches from the strain, and still I cannot place the clusterfucks of what it is coursing through my being over, over, under, around, down, again, over, because parts of me still tremble under the strain of burying deep. This attempt at unburrowing, followed by speaking, followed by forgetting, is somewhat futile as I am lacking the commitment. I don't want the commitment. I cannot commit. Commit. Quit. Vomit. Words.

I know not how to speak other than this; I know how, though, I am this way.
So I am stamping postcards with my fingerprints and sending them to pieces of past that couldn't afford the thirty two cents if they even tried, because they never tried. I am paper cut. I am broke because thirty two cents per card plus my two cents is a draining sort of thing. So I am broken. I am fighting my fire with yours, and it's contagious as it catches at the corners of anything precious.

My words are precious. They are all I have and as I stand here and stare as they ignite, my limbs fall, lifeless. Between all of these colors and visions and going around and under and over, I am no better than I was before. I know more of the truth and how it trickles from coconut skins onto parched lips and soothes, never satiating, but I am a barely standing thing, moving for the sake of motion and claiming it enough for the day to day.

And I know you know this, and it fucking kills me.