He said, "Your nail polish and her nail polish are the same color."
She said, "I need you, I think."
High school was everywhere, hallways were zones of conflict and places of hope. I skinned my knees and I begged for a band-aid you didn't have and the heart I used to have. I was never out for blood, I was out for someone to want me. Maybe that's the same thing?
God put you in my life for a reason, that much I know. So why did I never figure it out? Why did I never figure out what your bones were trying to tell me? Sometimes I wonder if the weeks I knew you were real, or if I made you up. I think I pretended to know more about you than I knew. I think we were always real, I know you were always real.
Let me know on Tuesday if your breath became the ocean, and if Wednesday will still come after that.
On Thursday, I want to know how far away Portland, Oregon is, I want to know the distance in inches and in centimeters and maybe we could go there? I'd like to go there and dance in the streets until we fall down and can't breathe.
He said, "Hey, you're cool."
She said, "We should do something fun, like hitchhike to the west coast. Or to Mars."
Then again, it's a shame that NASA isn't in Utah, and we can't all be spacemen. I wrote your name in the stars last night, because I knew a spaceman who owes me a favor, but then he left with all the stars in his right hand and I don't think he's coming back.
If we can't go to Portland, we can go to Canada. I hear it's nice there.
My hands are tainted with lies I told, maps of far off places, and words I couldn't find the courage to say. I'm not sorry I met you; I'm sorry I didn't tell you how much you actually meant to me because I'm a coward & a thief. I keep the memories of you & I in a dusty corner of my head, they're not much, to be honest, but they exist. I replay them in my head every so often, to remind myself you're real.
Every step I take gets harder and harder, it makes me ache a little more, knowing that every second I live is one second farther away from the day I met you and the day we both left.
It was silent in that moment and I should have said something but I didn't.
So it goes.
"We were born to die."
Forever Yours,
Rachel.
