How to Set Yourself on Fire

There’s a line on the first page I trace over with my fingers so often that the paper has started to bunch and fray, little specs of worn-down pulp as clingy pieces of papery lint.

There’s a line on the second page that I wish I could never read again. It has no pulpy lint.

There’s a line on the third page that I’ve copied out thirty times and counting in my own handwriting in a small book: “ You and I were able to briefly be the most beautiful thing in the world, the kind of beauty that without you, I would never know existed,” I wrote. He wrote. I wondered what it was like to know something so incomprehensible.

It’s not supposed to have been three years since I was happy. I almost don’t remember it. I almost don’t believe I ever was.

This is why I don’t have friends. This is why I stopped having friends. This is why it’s not worth it. Nobody is ever worth getting close to if I second guess myself all the time

watching him leave the house, that I saw him drop the letter.

We’d like to write it out to him in advance so he has no choice but to take it.

The shoebox sits untouched on my coffee table.

want to egg her on

Rather than longing to feel something so powerful myself, I mostly just wished someone felt that way about me. I didn’t feel any shame that I didn’t necessarily wish to feel that way too.

I don’t know if that distance was me or her.

I wonder what the ants know that I don’t.