if you weren't here, this, all of this would have been someone else's story. these passing days, white noise like warm, still water running down your arms, each passing minute stopping before it touched you, found you inside of it, you're yourself, and you're dead, an electrocuted body floating in an alabaster tub. outside the day is passing as summer, with the blinds drawn the windows keep the sunlight out, the entire house a furnace of red shadows, in the middle of which there's you, running away from the orange half light. yes, soon the family of four living below you notices the water seeping into the veins of this old old house, when the police fish your body out of the blinding bathroom, you aren't blue all over like you hoped you'd be, there aren't birds flying out of the insides of your lungs, even the last person you loved remembers the loving being incomplete, your body is a funeral, an apology maybe, to all the lovers you've left behind, every single finger tired of rounding up numbers against your skin. later, in a cold city morgue somewhere downtown, when the mortician cuts open your thoracic cage, they will find dead remains of a million sparrows plastered against your trachea, feathers choking the sinuses of your heart. your cause of death would be incompleteness, a lack of understanding, a noun and a number together with a person who you never got to be, an eulogy out of pity. for the wonderful girl you were, every lip quivering at the elegy because yes, nobody loved you but no, nobody wanted you gone.
