love her, be in her orbit, feel her like she paints the whole narrative. you joke - no gender. gender of wacky best friend with ultra-specific plot-relevant interests. love her, can't have her. love her, forgive her when she forgets your birthday so she can be on a date that doesn't even end well. love her, try to tear her hair out over a boy. cry on her floor and agree she should have him, you're just there. love her, know you are temporary. she was looking for him. the whole journey, all along. love her, try to coax her out of it, know her mother is saying the exact opposite, know you are a blue haired pronouns epigraph, know she is tuning you out.
love her, watch her get taught to refine herself into flint for his fire. no friends belong in her future. her whole path, beginning to end - seeking, mindless, the one. watch her scald herself raw trying to be perfect and shaved and skinny and smart and patient and motherly. she will hold your hair in her hands and bring you up to her mouth, drink you like a wishing well. she will close the door every time you are over at her house. in the morning she will make the same jokes he makes to her. copycat the wedding dress of her mother and every mother she's known before.
love her, kiss her on a tuesday, half by accident, feel the way she sighs into your mouth. love her, both of you singing at the top of your lungs to 90's punk rock. love her, fight by the side of the road, make up in a motel 6. love her, have her keep you as an experiment on the side of her college bed, little peach. your secrets in the air in pink satin. love her, tell her you want her, get told she-wants-you-too, somehow hear the apology before she even says it. it's not me it's you. love her, be not enough for her. be in the back corner again. be a funny remark again. be who she calls at 2 and 3 and 4 AM, be who she kisses while drunk again, be hers, because - you hear her laughing to him - she just likes the attention. love her, tell yourself you're too smart for this. love her, bite your own skin raw. love her, come back to her bed because you were always the weaker one, in the end.
love her, watch her get picked off, rabbit body into his hyena jaw. love her, love her, love her. she posts a picture of the engagement ring. love her, love her, love -
we had like, she says, looping her arms around your neck. a super long kind of ... a fling. and the way she says it, in front of all of the others, with this joy and mocking - you hadn't even known this was a game she was playing, and here is the punchline. this isn't the book. you weren't even a character. not a footnote.
you really meant nothing.