I feel like a child, wanting to
stop tomorrow from coming,
Not understanding why my
parents won’t pick me up
from this slumber party.
I want to lean over and shake you
awake and whisper and
gossip and laugh, keeping our
voices low, not waking the others,
staying up way too long,
wrapped in our
scratchy sleeping bags,
morning never coming.
I want to tell you everything I didn't get to
this past year, when your mind
slipped back, protecting itself,
both losing the you I knew - a complex
woman, an unreliable narrator, a curator of
her own beautiful art musuem- and taking
me right back to the you I loved
so inherently- one that even on a hellava
lot of painkillers, lit up at each of her friends walking through
the hospital room door, asking each one about the
tiniest, precious memories we thought we
had lost, that came to the forefront of your mind,
even with everything else receding
in the waves.
I want to tell you everything I didn't get
to, or couldn't bring myself to, over all
these years of friendship, when you think, it's fine,
I'll finally tell you what I'm mad about in my twenties
in our fifties.
I want to tell you what I love about
you that you never believed about
yourself. I want to tell you to choose
yourself every time, over and over again.
I want to say, in an exasperated tone,
like Lucy from Charlie Brown,
"DON'T YOU KNOW YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL?!"
like an aggressive One Direction song.
I want to tell you that being boy crazy
is a legitimate, dangerous diagnosis, especially
when it's the Matty Healy variety.
I want to apologize for stealing your pink eye shadow
glitter off your vanity that time
when I was mad and sad you were moving out.
I want to show you every video of you
I took from my view, where you are so
alive, literally screaming I WANT TO LIVE LIKE
THIS ALWAYS, half-drunk at an indie concert,
lit up in stage lighting, like a Madonna in a
Renaissance painting, like a sunbeam, warming
others privileged enough to bask in your light.
I want to tell you I hate myself for playing phone tag,
for my hateful ignorance of rescheduling,
stupidly thinking we'd have forever to meet up at
another coffee shop.
I want to tell you how dare you not grow old with Holly and Tara and I,
and how dare you leave me alone with all of our inside jokes,
and how dare you not see Wicked, and do you think Ariana
is gonna make it with that weird actor, and what do you think
of Lindsey Lohan's new face, and is Blake Lively in the wrong or just
unlikeable, and how dare I will never know how you would feel
about everything I want to talk to you about.
And you'd let me say all of this, because you understood,
even at the end when you were gone in body,
because you cared more about all of us and how
we were coping than your own pain, and you'd
let me cry and then we would laugh
and cry again and then we'd take cancer, and
physically, I mean physically, rip it to shreds like a
M.A.S.H. fortune we simply reject. And then we
would go eat and eat and rue all the days that cancer
took that away from you.
Lumpia, and pizza, and popcorn, and bubble tea, and too
expensive cocktails, and exorbitant tiny bites from Vida,
and hole in the wall questionable meats, and by God,
I hope you are feasting and feasting right now.
I hope you're brushing your hair. I hope (while you always
rocked a sleek, slightly longer lob) it is jet black, with the pink streaks,
long, long, long, long with iconic curtain bangs.
I hope you're reading trash. I mean smut. smutty smut.
I don't remember if I returned your copy of Midnight Sun.
I hope you're watching absolute garbage movies,
like so bad, like ChatGPT-written Lucy Hale movies clearly
filmed in Canada calling itself NYC.
I hope you're dancing at drag shows, cup in hand, loose bills
flying, cackling with delight, up next for karoake.
I hope you're with your lola.
I hope I hear "Mags!" just once more time.
I hope you know how much we love you,
how much we miss you, how much everything changed,
how much you took with you.
But if those memories aren't here with me anymore,
I hope they're with you, and you're scrolling through them,
and laughing
and laughing.
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