Alternate Universe Where I Died Last Tuesday

When my mother calls me, I don’t answer.

When my brother and his girlfriend sit at the dinner table, they wonder where I am

Like a book never finished, they’ll turn the page and find a cover

The final word’s been written and this story is over

The music stops

And curled snake strings lay broken at my cracked asphalt feet

When my father finally cries after 60 years

It’s onto blank paper and cigarette ash fingers

Onica child, they’ll send me your flowers

When the police come to take my body away

They don’t ask why I wanted to start going by my middle name

They don’t write “Cecilia” on their records

They don’t want to know how cold a hostel bed can be

And don’t care that I could feel my teeth rotting

When the coroner checks his clipboard

I’m no one’s first friend

When they cut my ribcage open

The stories I tell all have heart attack endings

Unshaved legs are going nowhere and my body stays raped

White cloth over black eyes

Back in the dark, she goes

I’m number one hundred billion

Dead-eyed dead girl

Nothing to see here

Keep moving right to the next great soul taken too soon

When I arrive at the place between awake and asleep

And I stand at the mouth of the Endless River

God asks me, “do you understand now?”

And I tell Her I’m trying.

But my lover still cries as he plays my voicemail into the dark

And my mother’s still waiting on that “I’m safe” call

“Oh, July child,” says She, “how broken is the heart with no love for itself.”

When I weigh myself right down into the earth

By the grace of angel dust go I into the night

But I won’t go forgotten

I can’t die unnamed

The flipped card song of my burnt tongue sings temperance

And by God, I haven’t learned it here

When my Bic flicker flame heart hangs onto life

I feel his hand against my breast

And feel mine against his face

“Why, God? Why now must it be me?

Is that just the way things have to be

And I control the Reaper like I control the sea?”

“Oh July child,” says She,

“Here, you’re a traveler

And you wandered too far from home

I’m the doorman at the gates, my love

But you were the one who entered.”

But Her words are drowning under miles of black water

An hour after I passed out I suddenly wake up alone

My mother calls me

And here, I answer

Here, my unshaved legs wrap around the one I love most

And here, I did not die in vain

Here, there’s still shopping trips to make at 11PM

Here, there’s blankets to fold incorrectly

And we can cook dinner together

Hot oil flicking out of the pan my grandmother bought me for Christmas

Here, I can touch myself and I don’t feel his hands anymore

Whole is the heart that loves itself

The music plays on

The pen moves forward

And oh, how beautiful it is