We are not in love, but we do sleep together, and sharing a pillow
is close enough. In the dark roots of my childhood I remember
the taxidermied animals lined up on the garage floor like rows
of my mistakes, and how the eye cavities of the crow’s skull
looked like forgiveness in my young palms.
We are not in love, but we collect worst nights together.
I wanted to tell you I am not afraid of your insomnia
or the way you look at your reflection in mirrors
whenever you’re craving a synonym for self-destruction.
Everyone has different reasons for being brought to their knees.
The hard truth is that some kneel because falling down
is easier than pretending to stand back up.
We are not in love, but you are the only one who has ever sympathized
with my tendency to collect those skulls of my childhood
and understood that by doing so, I was forming the blueprints
for my own demise by comparing their decay rates to my own.
I grew up to be a serial killer, but not in the normal sense.
I am just someone who wants to murder all possible versions of myself
because each of them is just as broken as the other.
We are not in love, but we both fell for the way
even our shadows flinch at the person they’re following.
We are not in love.
Not with each other,
not even with ourselves.