Trying to explain to you why you should live is like explaining
to eyelashes why they should keep moving with the force of blinking,
as if by simply marking the veins on both your wrists I can
make you understand their sheer importance.
In the heart of winter, we went skating on a pond whose ghost
had melted over several months ago. It was my way
of showing you that things once turned cold and hard
can always be softened again, but as usual, you came up
with a different kind of example when you pointed to your heart.
On our first date, you informed me that our relationship came
with strings attached: your first love was not me,
but instead wanting to let your brain explode into soft pulp
on the pavement beneath your apartment roof.
I was your second love, and can count on both hands the number
of times I asked the landlord to build a fence on the roof,
but could not come up with a plausible reason why.
On the mornings we rode through the countryside
with cold bottles of beer and avocados in the trunk for a
mid-afternoon snack, the first thought on your mind
was always killing yourself when you got home.
As one might assume, correctly, of course, our relationship
eventually deteriorated, and at the end I finally realized
the thought that had been slowly forming like a developing egg
in my mind for so long, but had only now begun to fully gestate:
you wanted to die. I wanted to live.
They canceled each other out, so all we both wanted to do was exist,
and you would rather have taken the s out of exist any day.