1. A Quick Q&A With The Author
Excuse me, but what the fuck am I reading?
Oh, this is just questions, and some answers, for people I’ve left, or I’ve
loved, or who’ve left or who’ve loved me.
How sweet, to remember them with such personal words!
I still can’t say it makes much sense, but to look at it like that…
Well, what a pretty gesture.
No, sorry, this isn’t pretty.
This is couples’ suicide draped in fabric embroidered with
misinterpreted Shakespeare; this only looks like lovers sleeping in a
snowdrift. Stop trying to add an acoustic soundtrack filled with similes
about blue eyed angels—their parents don’t believe in Heaven and are
suing each other for funeral expenses.
That’s absurd. I thought you loved these people?
If there aren’t any angels, if you don’t think they’ll go anywhere
better, how could you let them all leave?
Because maybe love isn’t real and maybe anywhere’s better.
Because this is euthanasia between youth in America; because if
most killers were actually sociopaths they wouldn’t be sharing; because
sympathy kills.
This is degenerates tying each other’s arms and a boyfriend
begging his circumstantial lover to save the day, and she is his heroine and
this is her Heroin and this only looks like love.

2. What a terrible image…
But don’t you care about anyone?
My God, would you care if I died?
You’re going to have to be quiet.
Shut up for a second and try to understand.
This is torture under placebo anesthetic. This is your insistence
you’re already dead and request for an autopsy. This is your life, ending,
and nothing is what you think.
What only looks like willpower is silence through the Y-incision.
What only looks like commitment brings you cookies; sympathy
disguised as negligence doesn’t drug test them; ignorance poisoned by
sympathy feeds you and hopes, not sure which outcome she hopes for.
This isn’t about me, you said so yourself.
This is your life, isn’t it?
This is your death.
If this is my death,
I’ve a few more things to explain while they cover me in dirt.
This is a eulogy scripted in advance:
“If you’re cold without the bonfire in my lungs, I left a cabinet full
of cinnamon liquor; if you dare say the word ‘dead’ stop yourself and take
a shot—the liquor works but a bullet is better. Cross ‘living’ out of the
dictionary as well—they should have called it something else.”
But you’re really dying? I knew it!
All those people you loved, they didn’t leave, did they?
You’re going to die on them, and pretend it was already over.
You selfish bitch!

3. Shut up, my God, shut up, you don’t get it.
This is solo suicide labeled performance art and sympathy
condemned as murder. What only looks like abortion is the ultimate
gesture of pity: we all wish we’d never left the womb.
Wait—you’re a murderer, too? Is that why everyone left you?
What do you think you’re doing?
Do you think this is some kind of martyrdom?
This is Romeo’s serial killings and med school students lobotomizing each
other’s mirror neurons.
I think I get it…
The Shakespeare, the crippling sympathy—this is love, isn’t it?
You loved all these people, didn’t you? What did you do to them?
What only looks like love is the way a patient eyes his favorite doctor, the
pleas to cut the string and let the carrot fall into his mouth like an arsenic
kiss.
“Sympathy kills” is the mantra of ambivalence as she dangles the
release code for infinite Fentanyl just above his lips.
…
This is your kiss goodbye.