It's still there.

That feeling.

A slight pain I get

When I remember the times I was able to see you

On a regular basis.

When I remember the days of silence,

The days of sadness, of hope,

Of crying into each others arms,

Of laughing at the stupidest things

Until our eyes were wet with tears,

And our stomachs burned in protest.

Of sitting outside the school against the wall by the trash can

Sweltering in the heat or shaking a little in the cold

And waiting for a parent,

Or waiting for a parent to forget we exist.

Discussing music,

Or discussing death.

Texting with our phones like normal people,

Or texting over a Google doc

To communicate

About the smallest

And largest of things.

Watching Meat Canyon,

Or just sitting there,

Watching each other.

As we lived our lives out

And laughed and suffered about it,

We would watch each other.

I watched you bleed yourself out

And murder your brain cells

For a passion that you never, ever

Not even once

Gave up on.

And you watched me

Make my way through

All of the emotions

That were eating away at me.

And then you watched me leave.

You watched me travel miles away

To pursue the same passion,

But you're already miles ahead of me.

And I'm watching you slowly

Start to live out more pieces of your life

That I can't watch.

But I'm so

So proud of you.

I hope you know that.

I just miss you.

And honestly,

I wish

I could take it back.

The tiny, momentary hesitation

That was the borderline between an opportunity and sameness,

But not quite sameness.

One day, several hours

Was all it took to destroy a path

I had no idea

I wanted so desperately

Until it was gone.

I'll be okay.

I've moved on.

We've moved on.

But as much as both of us have moved on,

It sticks with me,

That feeling.

I wonder if you get that feeling too.

I want to experience it with my own senses, my own

Readily astonished mind.

The ending of the Universes,

The beginning of them;

The creation of stars, the pull of Nothingness,

Resourceful civilizations, reckless wars.

To witness Life in a place so far from reach,

So differently entangled in the same laws of our Universe

That their appearance, their necessities,

Their breath, their brilliant thought, their environments

Are unlike any we picture from this sheltered, lonely world.

A true vision of Afterlife, Afterdeath, the Void;

The Creator, the Destroyer, or neither. Nothing.

The births of souls, of spirits, of Life,

And the mirror they look within

To See themselves.

Particles within particles

Within particles within particles.

Systems within systems,

Cycles, sciences.

What do we have wrong about our Existence?

What do we not know?

Everything, all at once, that ever has, is, and ever will

And Nothing, none at all, that ever didn't, isn't, nor ever will.

It's actually hilarious

How often I end up here.

In this exact moment.

The moment when I realize

I'm the only one

The world doesn't spin for.

Where I look around

And see that I'm the only one

Who isn't moving.

Familiar figures,

Motion-blurred

Like long exposure photography

Dash past me with an impossible momentum,

Leaving a swift burst of wind that ruffles my hair

In their wake,

And all I can do is blink.

Once.

Just once.

I can only blink one singular time

Before they're miles away from me,

A small black dot in the distance,

With tiny shining white eyes

That do so much more than blink.

I don't want to just blink one singular time.

I want to sprint, as fast as I can,

Carrying my giant, hopeful white eyes with me,

And become a small black dot

Myself.

In this life,

I can forget.

I can hear the unfiltered, warm voices of humanity through the phone,

Feel the vibrations of their existence through my palm

And keep those voices next to me, late into the dark hours of the morning.

I can feel the heat of so many precious arms that wrap around me,

That gently carry me with them,

And I have no fear of being pulled from their grip and thrown into the cold.

I can taste the flavors of the foods I once ravenously hungered for,

And they linger on my tongue for so much longer now, giving me strength

Long past the next meal.

In this new world, I can be undone

In the way I intend.

Intentionally.

And yet now I sit here on the floor

Of that life

While I unpack my bags

After having been in the sky for two hours,

With enough clothes for a week

Strewn across the carpet

I once bled on.

And yes.

It feels like home.

But home is where I was undone

Over and over again,

Painfully, chaotically.

In other words,

Not intentionally.

And still I put myself

Back into the hands of these strangers

On holidays,

Undoing myself intentionally

But not in the way I intend,

Because I have nowhere to go

If I don't.

[Verse 1]

Come,

Let me lead you astray

Just a few feet away from

The world that you thought you knew

Out

From under the gray,

Let me be a warm ray of light

In the storm that's surrounding you

[Prechorus]

Your silence is louder than you think,

You don't have to speak

Because I can still hear you

Words never did much for me

Would it be had to breathe

If I asked to be near you?

[Chorus]

I converse through the mouth of existence,

A language of footsteps I match to your pace

Quiet is better than distance

To hear the things no one knows how to convey

Can I have proximity?

[Verse 2]

Home

Was hell on my tongue,

You heard it through whispers

Of wind as I came undone

That was month one

When my voice wouldn't come,

Yet you'd sit with the quiet

As I pulled the air through my lungs

[Prechorus]

Your silence is louder than you think,

You don't have to speak

Because I can still hear you

Words never did much for me

Would it be had to breathe

If I asked to be near you?

[Chorus]

I converse through the mouth of existence,

A language of footsteps I match to your pace

Quiet is better than distance

To hear the things no one knows how to convey

Can I have proximity?

[Bridge]

I hate wasting time,

So let me bide my time

With you

I guess it's probably time

I say

That you're one thing I can't stand

To lose

Give me proximity

Can I have proximity?

[Chorus 2x]

I converse through the mouth of existence,

A language of footsteps I match to your pace

Quiet is better than distance

To hear the things no one knows how to convey

Give me proximity

Can I have proximity?

I converse through the mouth of existence,

A language of footsteps I match to your pace

Quiet is better than distance

To hear the things no one knows how to convey

Give me proximity

Can I have proximity?

It’s hard for me to tell

What color the plants should be right now.

All the grass keeps dying and waking up again,

Like the predictably invincible characters

In an anime that should've ended

Three seasons earlier.

It’s March,

And the trees, eternally half-blooming

With tiny bright caterpillars of warm green,

Are still caught in the prolonged stranglehold

Of the mistletoe that thrives in cold winds

And frosted bark.

In my eyes, It’s almost as if

The parasitic chandeliers could be hesitant;

Lingering around, uncertain,

Loitering and pacing

With invisible little plant legs,

Tortured by the annoyingly realistic possibility

That there might be

Just one more cold morning,

Just enough time

To squeeze one more drop of life

From the thin fingertips of another

Before it wanders off again

In the heat of the evening.

[Verse 1]

Kicking the TV

And wondering why the static's

Slowly crushing me

My channel-surfing white noise

Sleepless thought machine

It's getting colder

I'm freezing over

Eighteen below

[Chorus]

Salt-and-pepper alibis

Every future petrified

Footprints getting lost in snow

SCP-2949

Cross the tundra, blur the lines

Show me something I don't know

Hypothermic freeze

I can almost see my breath

Caught in the monochrome

Salt-and-pepper alibis

Every future petrified

Footprints getting lost in snow

[Verse 2]

Carve me from the ice

Chip away at every broken part of mine

Preserved under the time zones

Melt my peace of mind

It's getting colder

I'm freezing over

Eighteen below

[Chorus]

Salt-and-pepper alibis

Every future petrified

Footprints getting lost in snow

SCP-2949

Cross the tundra, blur the lines

Show me something I don't know

Hypothermic freeze

I can almost see my breath

Caught in the monochrome

Salt-and-pepper alibis

Every future petrified

Footprints getting lost in snow

[Bridge (2x)]

Black against a white scene

I can see the gangrene

Slowly creeping up my arms

I'm losing feeling

Can someone hear me, give me something

Tell me it's not all for nothing

[Verse 3]

It's getting hard to breathe

I'm getting nowhere finding patterns in the screen

The walls are closing in

My muscles start to seize

It's getting colder

I'm freezing over

Eighteen below

There exists within them

A quiet understanding of my world.

They see the concepts

That words don't exist for;

The ones that structure my existence.

They knew from the beginning

That it would take them

A very long time

To learn me.

And yet they still sit here

Connecting me;

Patiently reforming my complexities,

Weaving synapses

Between the things I already know.

Knitting me without a pattern

Because they know I don't have one,

Nor do I have the desire to predict

How they will change me.

They are tethered to me

Not with conversations and interlacing fingers

But despite them,

And instead leaning upon

The intricate language

Of mutual sentience.

[Intro/Chorus]

We are a god of war

Walking down below

On severed heads

And bloodstained stone

Our world doesn't like us

Oh, we already know

But it's Ares' burden

To strengthen weak souls

[Verse 1]

No, we aren't done yet

We've conquered the earth, but not ourselves yet

We have necessary chaos seeds to plant

Grudges, money, and filthy hands

And we repay ourselves in blood debt

'Cause we're the deity we worship

On the market is our flesh and bone

For half the price, give it half a home

[Prechorus]

We don't live in a society

If we kneel to gore

Shackled by our own adoration

But not the things that we adore

[Chorus]

We are a god of war

Walking down below

On severed heads

And bloodstained stone

Our world doesn't like us

Oh, we already know

But it's Ares' burden

To strengthen weak souls

[Verse 2]

Another dogmatism outbreak

Another martyr's been erased

We barter in our own morality

Is perspective worth our humanity

[Bridge]

They build statues for us

We just leave them to rust

What are we here to protect, to be a god for?

'Cause we're walking on ash and dust

Oh, are we still pretending

Like there's

Anything left on this

Planet that people won't just

Die for (impact)

Note: After the bridge, repeat the chorus but overlay the prechorus with it. Then accelerando & crescendo until tension peaks; after that, everything just abruptly stops, without resolving any chords.

As my world burned, I sat down on a soft patch of grass amidst its chaos. The citric scent of my steeping Earl Grey pierced through pungent fumes of ashen smoke that clung to everything it touched. The two odors blended together, invading my senses with a turbulent redolence as I turned to the next page of the book that was resting on my lap.