I’m catching flies and writing all the things
I fucking feel for you on scrolls
I place on their back.

Tied tight with snippets of shoelace, I don’t even try to avoid hindering their wings. Those feelings will weigh them down either way. Burden them. Just like they do me. Maybe they’ll reach you. Maybe as they’re careening into walls. Maybe as they’re flying off porches, hitting the ground with a thud. Maybe. Flies only live 48 hours, as long as I can cement myself to care about missing you. I’m carefree. It’s not the same without you.

I’ve spent time alone. I’ve been caught in the spaces of me, me, and more fucking me. Like when my pride made friends ghosts of all the things I never should have said. Have bled. And I ran away from them because hearts, all your ghost hearts, became feet and they were kicking to get the fuck out of my chest. I didn’t know the words for sorry. I believed if I kicked myself across the country, I’d be carefree. Surely a car would hit me. And if I lost an arm somewhere around Topeka, Kansas carrying all this fucking baggage, no would help me sew it back into place.

I was alone until I learned never is a place a place if calling out to cattle was the only way anybody’d hear my cry. Carefree meant sticking around. Just a little. No one’s got your number if you’re always running yourself out of the yellow pages.

And that lesson was shattered. Because I’ve been alone. Again. 8 months shouting at myself. When kindness was a killing someone’d have to do for me. To even say hello. To even walk three blocks out your way to check if I was dead. Or marathoning 30 Rock.

Alone, even on the sidewalk in rush hour. Talking to myself so much the words shot out my mouth and formed a whirlwind around me. You can’t see me with all those prepositions flying in front of my nose, conjunctions dangling by my ass. Being sick, I was a burden. Really, I get it. I stuck around to make a family and when it mattered, I didn’t.

When I was alone I shouted your names. There in the sky, they hung. Like neon lights in front of a seedy business. Like calling out for a way to end this sentence. But I guess you saw them and turned left up University Avenue instead.

This time being alone was a choice. To sort myself out. I took bits of my brain in my hand and splattered it across the wall. I made paintings with it. Of the way I thought it should be formed. Of how I should look.feel.act. I’m carefree, and it’s not really a place without you. But seeing how I’m spread up and down the walls of cheap hotels on every highway in Thailand. Being in place, is where I can’t be.

FOLLOW STEFAN PRUETT ON SOUNDCLOUD.

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