ukulele

Sometimes the aroma of your gardenia perfume finds me in a crowd, curling in my nose and clogging my brain with unwanted memories.

When I throw vodka down my throat, I think of you. The taste of nausea and bad decisions and good nights and worse mornings.

I hear a ukulele softly strumming and I think I’m dying. That was the sound of peace and comfort and now it is the tell tale tune of being buried alive.

I run my hand along the scrapbook you made for my eighteenth birthday, map out the creases in the paper. Because I tried to grasp your goodbye but it was just thin air pulling me into nothing.

And sometimes, occasionally, I see you out in the world, the girl who looks enough like my friend to suffocate me and different enough to make me bleed. I look at you and know, there is nothing left to mourn.