“You don’t remember being me, do
You?”
………………………………………………………..
“you were a very long time ago.”

so i don’t blame you
if you want to
bury me in your memory
i’m not the girl
i ought to be

Truth was, I hated that he still felt guilty. It wasn’t charitable but apologies didn’t exonerate the sinner, only compelled graciousness from its recipient. The words, each time they came, so repetitive that I could tune a clock to their angst, sawed through me. You can’t move forward when someone keeps dragging you back. I trapped the tip of my tongue between my teeth, bit down, and exhaled through the sting.

“Because it gets lonely down in the dirt,” Phillip continued, while I held my tongue to the steeple of my mouth. “Why do you think there are so many stories of ghosts trying to get people to kill themselves? Because they miss having someone there, someone warm. It doesn’t matter how many corpses are lying in the soil with them. It’s not the same. The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”

Like women, I thought. Like being a star, being loved, being hungered for. He excelled at inciting want, particularly the kind that tottered on the border of worship. Small wonder he was so inept at compassion sometimes. Every religion is a one-way relationship.

A girl in her bridal whites, jaw sharp as a promise. Her kisses close-lipped, without tongue or heat. Like a benediction or a prayer or an ending.

You know how poets say sometimes that it feels like the whole world is listening?

half-blind as I followed my Dantes into damnation.

“If I were one that had a heart that would cast you aside and turn to someone else, then waves would rise above the pines of Seunomatsu Mountain.”
“What the fu-

sat and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.

We could be dead.
You’d think it’d be harder. But if you’re desperate enough, you can shovel under the gum with your nails, digging out sickle-moons of bleeding pink flesh until the bicuspid loosens, pre-slickened with blood, and you can anchor a grip around the root and pull. At least we’d kept him from cutting out his heart. At least there was that. Faiz had fucked his own hand raw, trying to eke out a little bit of spunk to drip into the floorboards. But it could have been worse.
“If you were my friend, you’d let me die—”

“Help me.” His face was whiter than paint.
“Don’t,” Lin hissed into my ear. I couldn’t tell what he meant, if what he was saying was don’t engage, or don’t try because we are in act three and barreling down to the end, or don’t look. Don’t let this be the thing you remember about Phillip, golden boy, dead boy, organs slopping out of his side.

Since that moment, there were no thoughts of God. There was only a staunch belief that we are carbon and electricity and that was that. When you’re dead, you’re dead. And his Anne was in a beautiful plot that he visited when the shuttle could take him. And when he was lying in the ground next to her, her photographs would be thrown in the trash because her face wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. He was the last person alive who knew her and loved her

Faiz stared at me like I’d told him the secret names of the prophets, the private and the profane, the sacred alphabet shared by devotee and deity. He looked at me like I’d taken up the memory of his first word and given him a corpse instead. “I didn’t mean to.”

When Faiz took Talia in his arms, Phillip’s heart gave out, one last exhausted pump. He died alone while our backs were turned. Twenty-four years of being the center of everyone’s attention and that’s how he went out, not with a bang or a whimper, just a sigh and the world going colder and the last light from the lanterns dimming to nothing, fireflies in blind eyes.
We went home after that.

He loved how the ends of her cigarettes had red lipstick.

“There is no such thing as a crazy person, little boy. It’s just a person who is watching you.”

And then, he had the strangest thought.
God is a murderer.

The sheriff approached the tree. He looked up. The sunlight poured through the clouds above, making the frost on the branches glow with golden light. Instantly the thought came to him. As clear as the sun.
If God were arrested for murder, the people would ask for the death penalty.
The sheriff stared up at the tree house. The wind returned, moving through his hair like a whisper.
But the people could never kill God, so they killed His Son Jesus instead.
Some deer started to walk toward the sheriff.
Did Jesus die for our sins?
Or did He die for His Father’s?
He held this thought like a smoker cradling his last match.
The people didn’t put Jesus to death as a martyr.
They put Him to death as an accomplice.
He could feel the answer on the tip of his tongue.
Jesus forgave us for killing Him.
His Father never did