epitaphs for the living

i kissed a boy yesterday.

his lips tasted like freshly turned dirt and wilting rose petals, and his fingers felt like coffin nails in my hair. his blue eyes stared attentively at my face while i traced my fingers over his cut-along-the-dotted-line veins, and he murmured his philosophies of a true world into my ear.

he said there was a beautiful world behind this one, but it was like there was dirty gauze stretched across our eyes, preventing us from seeing it. then he told me about the land of the dead, that filled the same spaces and forms as this world, but was completely different. i asked him which one he prefered, but he only smiled at me.

he told me about this great old tree that grew outside the window at his childhood home. he said it had great, thick branches, almost perfectly perpendicular to the trunk. he said his grandfather had hung himself there. i asked him why, and his eyes stared off into a place that wasn't there as he replied "he was an old man at thirty two, and died long before he hung himself."

this boy with wilting rose petal lips was the saddest, most empty person i'd ever met, even more empty than i. he asked me to pray for him, and i told him i didn't believe in god. he smiled, faintly, and asked me what was going to happen to him, then, if there wasn't.

i kissed a boy yesterday. i think he was dead.