A Mouthful of Glass

To me, friendship was a leech. A pick, plucking my veins like guitar strings, weaving a ballad of bereavement. A birch leaf caught between summer and winter, turning a brilliant shade of molten gold before it shrivels like waterlogged skin and rots into the ground like a corpse.

You told me friendship had always been the rocks in your pockets and the chains on your ankles. Waterboarding and a head held underwater. To you, friendship was just different ways of drowning.

We put a cast around the remainder of our broken bones, fusing them together like soap shrapnel. We swore we’d discover a different way to pronounce friendship - one that didn’t include choking on the word.

You taught me how to paint pictures in my mind with colours as vivid as the bruises on my brain.

You changed my reds to crimsons, my blues to cobalts, my purples to violets and my blacks to charcoals.

I placed a pen in your gentle hands and reminded you they don’t have to stay empty.

I wrote reassurances on your eyelids in the hopes that you’d stop seeing the world as someone to hurt you.

The letters in friendship curved at the edges and softened on the page, running together so we could no longer cut our fingers on the sharpened edges.

And then you left.

To me, abandonment tastes like a mouthful of glass - shards going to war with flesh. Loneliness is the strange shadows in my room that, when trapped between sleep and waking, look painfully like the silhouette of your back as you walked away. And heartache - heartache is the shape of your ukulele you used to play me songs on.

The word friendship has jagged corners again. It’s dripping a vivid shade of crimson blood and it’s decaying like the burnt charcoal pages of our story.

To me, friendship is a scar that keeps reopening.