Sincerely, Jennifer x

The last thing he said, in silence,
was that my love was not enough for him to depend on.
In the echoes of an empty hallway,
his shadow, dancing in the distance,
he was so clear, that he couldn’t give it all up for me.

He used to carry me with him,
like a lucky penny,
or the hip flask full of liquid coping mechanisms that kept him going,
but I became harder to hold on to,
his waking nightmare, as nine turned to ten, ten to twenty,
good girl to gargoyle.

It’s always a story.
Some stories are sweet, and some are sorrowful,
so why should I cry, when either way, it’s content,
and I am content to say that I’m fine,
writing my lines and my lyrics?

He couldn’t give it all up, and I could pretend that I was fine with that, for a very long time,
but now I can’t.
I don’t know when I became a waterfall,
but I did, and I am,
and he doesn’t have to face up to this,
because his veins will forever be full of venom and vile things he found on a street corner,
and mine will forever be full of questions that can never be answered.
He is a pile of bones in a cemetery,
but I am still breathing.
We are not the same.

I threw myself off a building,
into the arms of a man covered in track marks and stickers celebrating his sobriety.
There was nothing special about him,
nothing so essential to my soul,
in fact, he was the wrong kind of sweetheart for me,
but I wanted him,
desperately,
relentlessly,
because he gave it all up for somebody he loved,
and I loved that about him the most.

I needed someone who could be brave enough to cut themselves off,
the way that the swinging, singing ghost of all my scars never could.
All my problems go back to a sunset,
just outside the gothic quarter,
where I smoked my first cigarette,
and realised that sometimes, a man can just stop loving his child, for no reason.

It didn’t help,
because I couldn’t give it all up for myself.
The trouble is, when you love someone who doesn’t belong to themselves anymore,
you get addicted to the idea that you can save them,
and here I still stand,
no marks, no celebratory stickers,
but still stuck on this madness,
this childish idea that I could have made him love me again,
that I could have saved his life and left him the air he needed, wrapped in a beautiful bow,
that I could have made a difference to somebody who was beyond saving, long before I was born,
that I can still get back on good terms with a ghost who won’t speak during seances.

The last thing he said, in silence,
was that I was wasting my time.
The last thing he said, in silence,
was that I wasn’t to waste anymore,
but I couldn’t hear him.