I Want You to Rest in Peace

To the man we used to call Hershey,

I want you to rest in peace, but it's hard to comprehend. My mind used to be filled with upbeat melodies and beautiful song lyrics that painted sunflowers above my head and that would make me dance as if no one was watching. I was carefree, almost too much sometimes, that I was uncontrollable, but now I'm sad dark poetry, too delicate to believe that the loss of you would be one sad day, and rather convinced that I'd been enslaved to it for the rest of the time I have that for some reason you didn't.

I'm traumatized that the feelings I once balanced on your shoulders when the weight became too much are feelings that you have no idea about these days, and that you can't have any idea about from here on. You stabbed me right in the chest, then literally disappeared without a trace, and the worst part is that you didn't do it on purpose. Your lungs gave out, your heart paused for a second too long that it couldn't turn back and your brain became conscience of not anymore of your intellect. I know it's messed up, but I feel the need to be mad at someone, and how could I allow myself to be mad at you? You didn't do anything wrong. Nobody did.

I want you to rest in peace, but I crave to crawl right back to you too. I can't accept that you left me because your kind eyes told me with every blink and every flutter that you would never do something so disgraceful and so heart-shattering. If you wilted me like a dehydrated flower on purpose while you were still alive, it would be easier to resent you, and yet the months are passing and I can't get myself to forget the memories we got to build while you were here. Every time I pick up a piece of fragile glass, the broken me, from the tiles of my bedroom floor three fall down in its place.

Every moment of ours feels like yesterday. I spend too many nights, neck arched up to the ceiling, so it's bound for that to be so. In fact, all I can see is you being the smiley you that you always been, lighting up every room you went into. I think about what it would've been like if I confessed, if I got to hold your hand, kiss your lips, hug you and be expected to go back for another. You were the best friend I ever had, the only one who ever really got me to be so raw and vulnerable and who still stayed despite seeing the mess, and I wanted more. I wanted more than I thought I could tell, and now I want more than I could ever have, more than I could ever know.

I want you to rest in peace, but I cry every time I hear your name, that the tears look like they're supposed to be there. My heart is a rock and every time I swallow it gets heavier beneath my ribs. As much as I hate myself, dislike the person I see in the mirror, I don't have time to stare into my average-ness anymore. I see my reflection and I think, it's these hands, these feet, these legs, these arms, these eyes that worked together so awkwardly because I wanted you to look at me and admire what you saw, even though I couldn't do it for myself. I remember the first time we made eye contact in a crowded room and how angels began to blissfully sing.

I didn't know that happiness could be that heavenly until that day. Demons used to eat me alive, yet I was cured from the sight of you. I've been attached to you ever since. You pulled me out of this burning pit when I was accepting the worst of fates, and I'm indebted to you. How can you store what I didn't pay you back if you're gone? There's no way people think that I can simply go on with my life after this, right? People don't really think that's humane? Losing the only connection that ever mattered?

My naivety must be too extreme if that's supposed to be possible. I didn't think I would ever say this, but I wish you were at home thinking of anybody, even if it wasn't me. I wish you were stalking their social media accounts, maybe even calling me up to rant about how beautiful your new crush is. I can imagine going crazy on the inside, having to picture you with somebody else, but at least you'd be healthy and well.

At least you'd be alive.

I want you to rest in peace, but I know that you deserve better. Living on past the span of your life makes me feel guilty. I know I can't help it. There's literally nothing I can do to change the way things are, but I feel like letting this be means that I'm leaving you behind, treating you like garbage that I didn't need anymore. You're underground six feet deep, almost as bad as paper bags from fast food restaurants are scattered across the highways. It doesn't feel right. I don't think it ever will. Some things you don't get used to, and this is one of them.

It's not like I could pretend that you were never around. I can't go back to the life I lived before I met you. It doesn't work like that. I could be having a better day than yesterday, a day that makes me feel like I'm healing and progressing, figuring out the person I am without you around, and then that one song you always sang when you played guitar at my house plays overhead and I won't be able to stop crying for the rest of the week. God, no one could understand how much I wish I can blame you for making me addicted to you as if you're some kind of drug. No one would get why this hurts so much.

Except you. You always knew the right thing to say. I needed that.

I want you to rest in peace, but every time I think about it my stomach hurts. I've been subtly sharing my love for you in every single breath I exhaled, and it doesn't have anywhere to go. It's stuck inside of me now, pounding at the base of my organs, begging to be let out and set free, to search for you again. I'm bottling my feelings up, as if I can wait for you to come back again and how much I treasure you can explode like its grown used to doing. It soaks up every drop of my energy like a sponge. I can't think straight anymore. I'm lost and I have no idea in what direction.

You're a part of me now, boy, and not in the "puppy love" way. You're running in the blood in my veins and in my habits. That used to be a good thing. It kept me up in spirits and power and gladness, but it's flip-flopped into poison, worse, that I can't get myself to let go of. I told you I'd come back for you again and again and I meant it, even if it's like this. Even if it hurts me. Even if I'm numb from head to foot and even if I can't make sense of it because you used to make me feel so much at once.

I want you to rest in peace, but my denying skull shouts that you're still roaming this earth like the travel addict you are. When you're not around, I see versions of you in random people I hardly know because I'm so deprived. I've figured out that the lady across the street that owns the mini store laughs a little bit like you do, hiding her lips behind her hands. The stranger that was in front of me in line stands the way you do, and the young girl walking home from school has the same little prance that you had. You're inescapable, more than you know or that you'd believe, and there's no being unattached to you and your marvelous being. 4:30 AM or 4:30 PM, it doesn't matter. It's always you.

This is probably my own darn stupidity. I've always told myself that it was dumb to get my hopes up. It's hoping and wishing for things that gives us expectations, and failed expectations that break our bones, but I felt too safe and special around you to believe that I would ever feel any kind of emotional pain. You were so deep and warm and cozy I just wanted to fall and never stop falling. I didn't think about death even for a second. Subconsciously, I might've saw us as some immortal kind, since I was so caught up on feeling your presence regardless of the daunting sobs and pointy thorn-like scenarios shooting at us. I was willing to withstand anything. Anything at all. Chest caved into my lungs, I'd be there still.

I want you to rest in peace, but in my dreams you haven't gone away. We lay together in an open field, peering into the sky with our arms and legs knotted up within each other. The sky is beautiful there, but it's not as beautiful as you, and the look on your face tells me, for whatever reason, you think the same of me. You say it aloud. I tell you you must be blind, and you respond that you'd never tell me a lie and that it was only right that I trusted you.

In a world of make believe, we worked out so well, I temporarily forget that I've been hurt and that you don't remember because it's the ending of you that ended me. I like not having to be awake. My first second aware in the morning, the fear sets on top of me again. I'm not given a break. Oh my, I feel so certain that if one day I do conquer this terrible feeling and I lose the suffocating hold it has on me, I'll regret it. It'll seem like I'm trying to forget you and I don't ever want to do that. You wouldn't take it the wrong way, would you?

I really didn't know that every time I whispered "I want you" before I went to bed, the world would whisper in my ear that that wasn't the end of the phrase and it pushed it along before I knew what it was doing. "I want you to rest in peace" will always sting a little bit.

Please come back to me one day. I love you so much. More than you know.