I think the wind smells more like sand and salt. The ocean kind that runs through your fingers and gets stuck between your toes. Not that you mind. You understand that he’s just lonely because every time the waves retreat from the shore he feels left behind. So you hold the sand in your palm, hoping you can show him how lucky he is to have the ocean at all and how dry the world can be elsewhere.

I feel things more physically than I used to. I don’t know how to express myself anymore.
I cried for no reason and he just watched. Asking me why. I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t know.
I feel sick.

“Everyone feels like a stranger and I can’t remember how to love any of them.”
The clocks fell off the walls at least a week ago and I seem to have lost track of time. I keep leaving my watch next to the bathroom sink. I wonder if my wrist misses the company or if its looking forward to its time alone as much as I am. I should have let you sleep at home tonight.

I couldn’t leave you if I tried.

I gave you back your given name tonight. I think I did it because how right you are makes me itch in my own skin. I have become everything I never wanted to be and you’re the only one to see it. I wish I could hate you for that.

Months ago, Dominick warned me I would feel this way if I got attached to someone. I laughed and told him that would never happen because I wasn’t that person. I guess I am now.

Someone told me once that the fastest way to go insane is to start living halfway, to throw old lovers into the wind with all of the empty candy wrappers from our “misspent youths.”
Is that how it will happen to us?
We wrapped around each other last night in the back of your car going over our own version of pillow-talk when you told me you knew we’d both go insane one day. I had the most beautiful image of an elderly couple sitting in rocking chairs on a white porch, smiling. Rocking back and forth silently, smiling.
Is that how it will happen to us?
I use to tell myself how good lonely tastes: like a cheap red wine I’d bring to parties to feel cool, like the American Spirits I buy because I won’t rot my insides away until I’ve sucked every last bit of smoke onto my tongue first. But I haven’t had a glass of wine since I went to that party without you and I haven’t had a cigarette since you walked out of the room with my case still in your jacket pocket so let me ask you one more time.
Is this how it will happen to us?

I was watching the way the street lights were reflecting off of your profile on the way home tonight. You look so in control behind the wheel of a car and that turns me on. I fell sort of half asleep to the thought of how totally and completely, head over heels, lost in Wonderland in love with you I am. It was the best sleep I’ve gotten in months.

Sometimes you look at me like you can’t believe that I’m actually wrapped up in your arms and other times you stand on the other side of the balcony with a cigarette in your hand that you don’t even want and you are so far away.
Kiss me.
I can’t, my head hurts.
Hold my hand, then.
Alright, sure, I guess.
Kiss me. Wait. Don’t stop. Don’t go. Alright fine, good night.

So we threw our palms in the air, our forefingers and pinkies stretching to gods we sure as hell didn’t believe in. We took another drink and another hit and taped another can to the tops of the towers we erected for our youth. We are a joke. A beautiful, messy, terrible joke and we are just where we belong.

My heart just broke harder than it ever has from any boy. I hope you know how much I love you. I hope you realize how childish you’ve been. I hope you see one day how wrong you are. I hope you learn the ability to recognize that you are not always right, that you are not always better, that you are not always wiser. I hope you do everything you’re working so hard to do. I hope you never regret all of the things you’re giving up for it. I hope I see your name in a great novel one day. I hope you see this, because you won’t give me the opportunity to say it all to you personally. But most importantly, I just hope that you don’t let your insecurities get the best of you forever like they did our friendship.

He has no idea how special his mind is and that’s the most beautiful part.