after

dear ben chasny,

you are beautiful, you look sad and fucked up and it makes me want to tell you things. i think you will understand.

i don't miss him that much anymore.

but after it ended i wanted to die so i just stopped looking before i crossed the street. i woke up in the morning and lay there pressing down into the mattress thinking "i hope i die today" and it was a soothing thing to think of. i always said there are two kinds, the leavers and the left, and i'm a leaver. thirty times around the sun and it was my first broken heart. they haven't invented an alphabet to describe how i felt.

i thought i was a movie screen and he was the projector.
(in retrospect i think it was the other way around.)

ben, do you think i can only love what is broken?
what is reflective?
sometimes i worry about that.

have you ever been so beat down that your best friends touch you and you slap their hands away? people say kind gentle things and you hate them, you hate them, you want to smash them into the ground into blood into dirt and grind them into nothing. and grind yourself into nothing. because you're only getting through today by making yourself less than human and any gentleness reminds you that you can't breathe.

ben, do you know what it's like to undertake the sick work of digging out deep pieces of yourself?

these things heal from the bottom up and it takes so long.
tell me what happens after.

'night.
a