Hey Mads, I know it’s been a while since we last spoke,
but I’m starting to worry there isn’t help for me out here.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m considering going away soon,
somewhere to focus on getting better, whatever that means
for a person like me. I’ve been a bit down and out these days,
clinical visions, chronic superstitions, and recently I dreamt
about being strapped down. Listen, if anything were to happen
to me, tell whatever lies necessary to ease their suffering.
Claim I forgave indiscriminately. Tones ominous, I know,
but I promise I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, life
and death equally. Do you remember our girlhood summers?
The good-natured tussles in your family’s backyard pool?
I keep returning to the time you startled me from underwater,
and I socked you between the eyes on unadulterated instinct.
You didn’t believe me when I said your nose was bleeding.
Tilting back your head to laugh, eyelashes wet, red
smeared across your upper lip, I was overcome with guilt.
It was the first time I had hated my own two hands.
If I knew then, how commonplace this occurrence would be,
how often, I’d cringe at my own capacity to cause harm,
maybe I would have felt differently. If your first drops of blood
are hardest, it should get easier as you go, but I stole his pipe,
some cash, and a case of seltzers the day he ditched me.
Rightfully, got another man fired, then couldn’t sleep for a week.
Mads, I broke the clearest heart ever offered to me, released it,
a dove, into the existential wind turbine of the modern century.
Theoretically, this shit should be a breeze by now. I don’t know,
maybe I just enjoy the thought of looking back on this moment,
ten years from now, to remember there being a lot less blood.
Anyways, sorry this message got so long; call me back if you want.

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