do you enjoy talking to me or am i only a litany of old complaints, a voice circling the same drain i first leaned over at seventeen. could you ever sit with me not as an echo chamber but as someone who would drink coffee slow let the cream form galaxies on the surface ask me about the weather or a dream without searching for tragedy in the foam.

i wonder if you would grow bored of the way despair rehearses itself each verse of my life rewritten in the same minor key. would you sip nod and wait for silence to refill the cup. or could we scatter the script let our talk breathe easy spill over into laughter the kind that leaves rings on the table, the kind that is not afraid to be ordinary to be alive without apology.

because i do not always want the shadow of seventeen following me into every sentence. sometimes i want to believe i am more than the ruin i rehearse. sometimes i want you to sit with me anyway to hear the pulse beneath the lament to know that even in the spiral i am reaching for light reaching for you.