Birds of A Feather — Billie Eilish

I remember the first time I lied to you.

It was so easy.

I felt little to no remorse.

You were standing right in front of me, smiling from ear to ear.
The biggest, most beautiful smile I’d ever seen.

And you believed me.

Why wouldn’t you?

It was me, after all.

Time rewarded your blissful innocence, and so did I.

You learned that good things came from me.

Brick by brick, I built a web you couldn’t see, just so everything felt seamless.

So we could live a happy life.

And we did live a happy life.

We were the happiest power couple around.

All you had to do was follow my commands every once in a while.

We needed a language only we could speak
beneath the judgmental gaze of a world that couldn’t stomach our kind of love.

And perhaps that’s why I learned to lie so well.

I needed you to trust me.

Blindly, if possible.

As blindly as I trusted you.

As ridiculous as that might have seemed to anyone looking from the outside.

Because on paper, I shouldn’t have trusted you the way I did.

But there I was,
making myself vulnerable every time you got rowdy,
letting you see just how much of me belonged to you,

hoping you’d understand that I was yours as much as you were mine.

Proving that no matter how hard the weather
raged outside and inside our one-bedroom apartment,
I would never hurt you.

And neither would you.

At least, that’s what I promised myself.

I became too good at lying to you.

At some point, the guilt hollowed out and vanished, because there was always something out there I needed to shelter you from.

Things you couldn’t make sense of.

A world too loud.

Lights too blinding.

I remember your face softening.

The way your body finally relaxed,
surrendering to sleep against my chest,
as if whatever was wrong with the world had finally been dealt with.

And I let you believe it had.

We spent a thousand nights like that.

But we had beautiful days, too.

So many sunsets.
So many weekends when it was just you and me,
the breeze, and the taste of freedom.

For the longest time, that was all there was.

Your smile.
The smell of your happiness.
The breeze against my cheeks.

I could have lived inside those days forever.

And sometimes, I almost believed I would.

Until God, or one of his less forgiving comrades, decided we’d had enough.

And the cycle began again.

I started lying to you.

I had to.

Only this time, something in me went black.

With every word I spoke,
something in me rotted further,
as if all the lies I’d ever told you had finally come to collect their debt.

And the worst part was that even the things I never intended to lie about became lies.

I told you I’d be back in time. Every day.

I told you I’d make sure you got your medication when you needed it.
That you wouldn’t have to wait.
That I’d take care of everything.

But I was rarely on time.

Hours of pain because I wasn’t there when I said I would be.
Hours of waiting for something that was supposed to make the world hurt a little less.

I used to tell you things would get better.

That it was just a little boo-boo.

And you believed me.

You smiled.
You always smiled.

But you never got better.

Nothing got better.

There was simply less of you every day.

I told you I was going through the same thing.
That it was something that happened when you woke up on the wrong side of the bed
and sometimes took a while to go away.

So I started walking the way you did.

I limped alongside you,
hoping you’d feel a little less alone.

But your limp grew worse.

A little more every day, regardless of the brace I got you.

I told you the new, yummy medication would get you back to your normal self in no time.

That we’d figure it out.

That this was just another rough patch.

But the homeopathic medication barely bought us a couple of months.
The pain medication eventually stopped working.
The CBD stopped making a difference.

Yet if there’s one lie I’ll remember for the rest of my life, it’s the last one.

The day I brought all your favorite toys to that godforsaken room.

I spent forty minutes on the floor with you.

Forty minutes lying to your face, like I’d done your entire life.

Like the piece of shit I had become.

Paralyzed, unable to give your doctor permission.

Unable to speak the words that would make everything irreversible.

So I kept talking.

I told you everything was going to be okay.
That you were just going to take a little nap.
That when you woke up, I’d be right there, with all your favorite toys.

I promised I would never abandon you.
That I would never let anything bad happen to you.

You were my adoration.
My daughter.
My love.

And there I was, making promises I knew I couldn’t keep, minutes away from authorizing the injection that would end your life.

I held your paw for the last time.

Kissed your nose.

Took one last deep breath,
memorizing every bit of your nine-year-old Cheetos breath.

Your eyes were wet,
exhausted from a pain I could no longer fix.

And I laid your head against my chest.

Just like we always did.

For all those days.
All those nights.

All those times I’d held you there and convinced you that everything was okay.

I remember how heavy your head felt.

I remember how I held you.

And I remember lying to you one last time.

Telling you everything would be okay, my love.

That we just needed to take a little nap.

That we’d run through fields of green again,
until we were both out of breath.

Like we did when we were younger,
terrorizing Siberian huskies
and shredding the remnants of your old, colorful rope.

That when you woke up, I’d be right there with you, with all your favorite toys.

You blinked.

You exhaled.

And then you left me.

The last thing you heard from me was a lie.

Perhaps the most convincing one.

Because that was the last time I lied to you.

And the first time I lied to myself.

When I believed I’d eventually be okay.

That I’d learn to crawl out of this endless loop.

That someday, the weight of your head against my chest would become just another memory.

But it never did.

And perhaps it never will.

Because that Saturday morning,
on that very same floor,

we both died.

Sign Here was originally published in Tales of Blue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hate Me — Blue October

For being the absolute center of my story,
it is ironic, almost distasteful, how rarely I speak your name.

Almost nothing on paper.

Just a poorly written song about the trauma of being late,
about watching your ghost fade away while I multitasked,
barely listening,
about standing next to you when it no longer mattered.

Separated by wood and glass.

For as much as I loved you, and you loved me in return,
apparently a wretched song you never heard
is all I’ve ever been able to give you,
besides those dead flowers you never saw.

I barely talk about you.

Isn’t that a sour, fucked-up joke, after everything you did for me?

The words can barely escape my mouth.

It is as if I’m once again a tormented Mormon teenager,
petrified at the idea of speaking the true name of his Heavenly Father.

Scared to death to even think the letters in sequence.

Even though I tattooed your name on my wrist
so I could see it every remaining day of my life,
I look right past it.

I swallow your name when I tell stories of my past,
always defaulting to your better half.

Something must have broken in my psyche that day.

Maybe it was the unmistakable smell of your burning body
escaping through the chimney of the crematorium.

Or the sound of your naked weight hitting the rusty oven,
manhandled by a stranger who treated you with about as much dignity
as a New York pizza hitting the bricks during rush hour.

Maybe it was the twenty minutes I spent outside the gates,
frozen in time.

Unable to shake the image of your pale, yellowed skin.
The discharge.
The insects.
Your hair, uncombed and disheveled.
Your hands clutching onto the man on the cross.

But if the God you prayed to so faithfully is just and real,
how the fuck did he allow this to happen?

To you of all people.
To you.

Years have robbed me of more than just your wrinkles and freckles.

They stole my courage to call you back,
to pull you up at will from that corner of a chemically deficient brain
where I used to hold you,
and be held by you.

Because there used to be a simpler time before death.

Before your disease bullied you into an eternal loop no one wanted to hear.

Before the facades and the dead air between phone calls,
there was a time when we roamed the streets.

Before I left you to negotiate with your own fate.

Before I started hiding my struggles and vices from you.

Way before I became a burden,
before you even had to worry about saving me
from the shadow of my own poisoned shelter
and the darkness I inherited.

We walked for miles. Endless miles.
You were slow. I was impatient.
But I was happy. Always happy just to be with you.
Because you were home. Always home.

We were as happy as two ants could be without being free.

I was hoping for better days.
You were hoping I could just have a decent life.

Maybe because you could already see where my tracks were leading,
or because it crippled you to watch me bleed out in real-time.

But as damaged as I was,
I was still innocent.
Even though I once attempted to end my own life in your restroom,
death was something I could never associate with you.

Only with myself, every once in a while.

You were a loving constant in my universe.
Or so I thought.

I thought those walks would last forever.
Every Saturday morning, the exact same route,
in pursuit of a straight line and a perfect smile.

Because that was something you could offer me:
paying to fix my atrocious dental misalignment,
hoping I might hate myself a little less every time I looked in the mirror.

Your worn, loving hands couldn’t save me from everything else.

The machinery was too far gone.
And maybe you knew the years ahead would only peel the wallpaper back further.

But I was blind to it.
I was broke, bruised, but never that broken when I walked beside you.

All I wanted to do was walk.
Always next to you.
Walk miles. Endless miles.

Years have passed, and half my bottom teeth are still crooked.
The chase for a better smile was cut short,
interrupted by a life that saw you crumble
into a snowflake made of ashes.

Now all I have is the residue sealed in an urn,
2,763 miles away from where I live.

Too far away to even mourn you properly.

All I’m left with are images that torment me in my sleep
and pharmaceuticals that keep the shadows at bay, sometimes.

The last words I barely paid attention to.
Your voice trapped inside an iPad
you never learned to tame.

This cyclical self-hatred that flares up with the turn of the seasons.

And these crooked teeth,
reminding me that all I have left are the things we never got to finish.

Because I left too early.

And maybe so did you.

A Straight Line was originally published in Tales of Blue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear brother,

I have played a million scenarios in my head

I used up every vocabs and words that I knew.

Somehow,

I still could not find peace and comfort in any scenarios

no words gave me warmth like the temperature of you.

I rehearsed, I picked out words and structured sentences

just to play, pretend I had another minute with you.

The kind where you will be here.

I wondered what I would tell you

if I could be next to you again .

Would I tell you how easy life would be if you were here?

Or would I tell you how miserable life had been?

Or would I sit in silence right next to you,

to make up for the time stolen from me from your absence?

I did not only lose you, I lost myself.

I grieve and mourn at every milestone,

every success,

every failure,

every sadness,

every happiness.

You’re my heart in a human form.

You will forever be five in my memory,

yet, you grew with me

as I made through the years in life.

The calendar changes every year,

but mine stopped on the day you left.

Just like the dreams I had

to be a brother,

the one who cares,

the one who loves,

the one who nutures,

the one who protects.

I have sat with every silence,

every memory,

every night

speaking to myself

as though i hoped every whisper of my heart,

every thought unheard,

every word unspoken,

every dream unfulfilled

will be heard and seen by you.

In the corner of my heart,

I hope to leave like you.

Not because there is nothing for me to live for anymore

but because there is still so much

I wish we could share.

Maybe in another lifetime,

we could be brothers who complete each other,

who fight alongside one another,

who live life together.

Maybe in another lifetime,

we could share conversations,

we could share moments,

even successes,

and failures

together.

Perhaps I could watch you grow

hear your laughters fill a room,

watch you live your dreams,

grow to be the person you aspire to be.

Perhaps,

I could live my dreams

of finally being a brother.

For now,

I will hold on to the memories of you,

to the idea of you and carry you

into the next years that you are not here,

into the time that you could not see,

into the life you never get to live.

And if one day we meet,

I hope you will recognise me.

Not as someone who you last saw

but as the brother,

who carried a million what ifs,

as the brother who spent all these years,

maybe even his entire lifetime

wondering what could have been.

– BatteredPoet

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THE LETTER THAT WAS NEVER SENT was originally published in Tales of Blue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Confusion of Existence

I fear death, I fear living.

Death sounds like a romantic end

to the misery

to the pain

to the weight of living.

Yet living sounds like a dreamy promise

to a greater path

to a better life

to a better tomorrow.

Maybe that is where the confusion lies.

Like a promise that may be lived up to

and a reassurance that still leaves gaps of uncertainty.

So which side do I be on ?

What if life was never promised

like how I wished or imagined it to?

But what if death

was the halt to the promises made?

Should I still believe and hope

to a tomorrow that was never a guarantee?

Or should I grieve and mourn

to a tomorrow that I may not see?

Maybe existence is never about choosing sides.

Maybe it was never about being comfortable.

Life may be a landslide that sweeps and erase;

yet, life can also be a land full of gardens.

Death may sound like a warm blanket that covers at night

signifying an end to the day.

Yet, it can also mean an end to a beautiful beginning.

One day I will learn,

not to choose

but to survive

to accept that existence is about making peace

not only to life or within myself

but to the uncertainty of both.

– BatteredPoet

THE CONFUSION OF EXISTENCE was originally published in Tales of Blue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Wife said crows don’t come here

I said good

She said all we see are pigeons and bulbuls

I’d like to see some crows

I hate pigeons, she said

They don’t let me sleep, she said.

I think all the crows have swarmed into my heart

Black formless molecular

I’ve swallowed them whole

I am fascinated by their intelligence

Their sharp regal stare

Their knowing beaks.

When I was a kid

I must have swallowed them all.

I’ve watched them for years

Sitting on the electric wire

Outside my window

Above the filth, shit and

Random corpses of cats and rodents.

Walking back from school

Crows flapping over a corpse

Were blended into the background,

The spots where you consciously

Never focus your eyes.

I feel they have always known

That I have never welcomed them

Beautiful though they are,

They have conspired

To break into a dark cloud

Black formless molecular

And live in my heart

Their entire murder.

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Crows on a Wire was originally published in Tales of Blue on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.