1. You were supposed to come with me. When I walked out of this crumbling city, the world collapsing around us, you were supposed to be by my side. But when I turned to see if you were following, I saw you standing so far behind, looking at the ashes that covered everything, looking at the broken glass falling around you, looking at everything but me. You simply looked on at all of the destruction, but I don't think you ever really saw it, not even after everything that has happened from then to now.
You stayed behind in the flames that were killing us, in some mindless attempt to save those who struck the match in the first place. The heat melted away at who you were, curling your edges like an old photograph burning up, the memory of you disappearing under scorch marks and smoke. You sat in the middle of an empty room while it burned around you, surrounded by all the habits you never could break.
You dived into the ocean for the people who would only drag you under to drown. Stood on the high cliffs above I watched as you fell, tried to reach you before you could hit the surface, before they could get to you. The waves beneath strained towards you, their upturned hands trying so hard to hold you down where I could not reach, down beneath the blinding blue. So sure you could keep yourself afloat, half in their world and half in ours, you let yourself fall without a second thought. They pulled you under with ease. You never did learn to swim.

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27/04/19
5:40 - 6:15 watching the sun come up


falling through the universe while i fall for the stars in your eyes. take me to a world that only you can see and we can fall back, back to the sky. count the silhouettes of trees and measure the distance from your hand to mine. when the sun comes up it casts a shadow between us and we're both so afraid of the dark. the sky grows light around us yet we remain only outlines for a while more. wind your fingers through the clouds and pull, push your thumbs into the stars until you burn up or they burn out. blink and find the sun crawling back to the sky like a dying man to the ocean like me to you. the sky is stained and the moment is lost. the stars hide beneath their sheets and color bleeds into the frail grey of dawn. easy to forget when the sky is this blue easy to forget that i'm becoming you. pale yellow the glow falls onto you now. are you an angel? stare at the sun for too long and you'll find nothing is clear. what would you call that colour that the sky becomes just before the sun is up? you know, between blue fading briefly before returning even brighter, and the slowly rising gold which shines so brightly but is gone so fast. there's a colour in there which i can't put a name to. i suppose it looks like grey, but no. there's something there that i can't identify with words. (you know how it scares me when i can't find the words i want) i've spent hours trying to recreate that colour, with paint and with poetry, but maybe i'm not supposed to. maybe i'm not meant to find it, maybe i was never meant to find you. i don't think i'll stop trying though. because one day when i find that colour, i'll paint the world with dawn, and we can hide in our silhouettes forever with the trees and the broken streetlight outside of your house. please be careful though. blink, and the sun is up, blink, and we both see clearly again.

One finger twirling shakily in her hair and the glossy giggles of an actress tumbling from her lips, Katie Miller listened down the phone as one of her friends, whose name she had never actually bothered to learn, complained about some problem she'd had for a while now, which Katie had also not bothered to learn.

She had learnt long ago how to ignore the feeling of deja vu that all of her phone calls were stained with, knowing exactly when to sprinkle in an "Oh my god!" or a "No she didn't!" whenever a silent moment beckoned.

Going into autopilot, Katie stood and padded over to the window, through which the slowly setting sun cast a coral glow over everything in her room. She allowed herself a brief, ironic quirk of the lips when she saw how the sun shone through her reflection, bathing her image in pale golden light like it were something angelic. Yeah, because that was likely.

Head tilted slightly, Katie watched over her reflections shoulder as the shadows of distant mountains merged with the shadows in her room, the ones that loomed above her bed and behind her back.

She tuned back into reality just in time to catch the familiar and damning lilt of a question that was delivered like rhetoric and yet still demanded an answer. Painted mouth dropped open slightly, she found herself scrambling for a neutral response, and panic began to drip through the cracks in her ceiling, shadows pooling on the floor as the sun fell behind a tree.

But she was good at this game, and not even a second had passed before she turned her back to the creeping, anxious darkness, letting out a well-timed and sympathetic sigh. A consolingly murmured, "Well, I think you should just do whatever you think is right," and the white-noise of Nameless Friends inane chatter filled the room once again. The panic slipped through her floorboards and soaked into the fabric of her sheets, disappearing as quickly as it came, while Katie reminded herself how to breathe again.