never mine to lose

“how did the whole katie thing turn out?”
(She looks at you, ahead, walking, handsheadbody moving, she is so beautiful. You are coming to the catty-corner crossing on the way to your old elementary school. Your hands tear carelessly at a dark green, narrow bush-leaf; you know her face, her creases, the scars on her legs and the way her hands tell secrets when her mouth doesn’t. You made memories with her and memorized her laugh)
“i told katie i’m not stable enough for a relationship and she told me that i should try to kiss her anyway and i told her no but i was smiling and she doesn’t know that my smiles mean no. so she kissed me”
(I wish I could be hers, but I am not. I know I cannot. I do not say a word)
“and i had an anxiety attack.”
(She texted you, two months and seventeen days ago: she lost her virginity in first grade, to a second-grader named Sarah who was her friend. This was her first kiss)
“you said no. she shouldn’t have done that if you said no, although i guess i can understand why she did what she did because you were smiling. it’s still wrong though, and i’m really sorry she hurt you.”
(But there is a small part of you, regretting: she is not stable enough to be in a relationship; even if she did, she likes Katie, never you. You are only the friend she vents to. And really, she deserves an amazing girl, and you cannot give her that, you have a brain that is fucked up and hands that are clumsy with strings, puppet-strings and red-strings and knots that don’t tangle. You cross the street, and she is beautiful)
I want you to sing at my funeral.

–

History repeats herself; it is two years later
(i thought i had become better than this)
and her name is Emma and she loves matches and a boy named Lee more than she could ever love me
(we made the same agreement, in texts on a monday night this time instead of walking towards railroad tracks on a friday afternoon. our rube goldberg machine is simple enough; if she goes by gasoline, i will follow her with rope and hands that have finally learned to tie)
We are going up the hill (all the way to a heaven
neither of us believe in
where she can be a god
and i, an angel) and I kiss her cheek, surrounded by the gray concrete of high school walls
and the red-brown brick of hallways
unsure of what to say
we stumble, we separate, clumsily entering different math classes
and while I do calculus I think of her and
(i feel like a crime scene in slow motion, i cannot tear my eyes away from it all)
I think I might love her
(she is breaking, the kindling of her brittle bones crackling as it sparks and catches ablaze, as miles away her parents scream, as i pray instead of integrating equations, and all i can think now is)
please, jesus, not again