I’m sitting on the seventh-story bathroom floor and I blow smoke rings on the collar of the boy who tells me he loves me. There is sawdust between my nails, and the boy tries to say something but lets out a sigh instead. My lovers have learned not to make a burning woman bleed more ash. Ma messages. She says: come home. And maybe this is falling apart.  

The boy who loves me knows nothing about me. I promise myself I won’t write about blood and hurting myself but I wake up at 2 a.m. and vomit out a poem, and it smells not of roses but the sins I gulp every night. The boy who loves me strokes my hair, and I push his hand off. I mouth: there has been blood on this body. He says he’ll still try. I want to break him right then and there but I need an escape. He is my escape.  

I drink only one third of my water. On the to-do list of five things, I do two. I break a glass. I delete my playlist. EVERYTHING YELLS OUT HIS NAME. And I think I almost got through today without crying. I almost got through it until the boy who loves me asked why I never say the damned four-lettered word back to him. Until Ma told me Grandma wants to play Ludo with me. Until I remember no one knows the fragrance in my bones. Until I realize the boy who loves me is not the one in my poems. Until I’m crying and crying and it’s not even falling apart—it’s this never-ending feeling of waiting for a train. It’s running with every breath left within you, just to fall on the tracks and have your life travel over you—travel without you, and for you to be just a stain, reminding the world of the heavy humanness of life.  

And we are not even dead, we are still rotting. Our skeletons are still stating their last wish. We still ache to see sunlight once more but here we lie on this bathroom floor, and I make love not with this boy who tells me he loves me, but with this everlasting smoke—and baby this smoke is the only thing that isn’t poison within my tattered lungs, the only one who I don’t cry after I kiss.  

The boy passes me his jacket. He says I’m cold and I think I’m falling apart and it’s not a kind I’d like to write in poems. It’s the kind that kills you. It’s the kind that is killing me.