Beneath streetlight eyes.

"This isn't living," I say and you are silent. You don't have to say anything for me to know; you don't like to believe in anything until you know the answer, until you can see every step. There's no answer key to life, but I don't say so. "What's wrong?" I ask and you fumble, say something about your parents, your love life, your friends who hate me. Your lie is bleeding, but this is the only language we know. "It's going to be okay," I say, but this means nothing to people like us, and we are silent again.

It's easier to lie to you because sometimes I hate you, but usually not. The words slide out of my mouth like tobacco leeching from my lungs, and you relish them, tasting every last one. You like it when I lie to you, and sometimes I like to watch you burn. Sometimes I hate you, but usually not.

We are the children in perpetual motion, rising through the night like sparks from a fire. We taste the sky, drinking beneath the harsh light of parking lot eyes because sometimes we hate ourselves, sometimes we want to know what it means to die. Someday, we will regret this, but not tonight. Nights like these, I wonder if someday will ever really come.

You watch as I finger the white pills and wash them down with whiskey. Your mother always told you to just say no, and sometimes you wonder what happened to you, to the person you were. Something inside you breaks as my pupils swell, and I'm glowing, I swear, I am floating on top of the entire world. You don't like to know me when I'm sinking, so this is okay, this is better. Here, we can be two lonely people who fell from the stars. We can be meteors, two lives full of apathy and never, never enough.

You told me once, while we were drunk and the others were sleeping, that I was an enigma, an unstoppable force. Sometimes, I think you don't know me at all, that late at night when I'm selling you my soul, you're telling yourself I'm only what you need me to be, someone to hate so you don't have to hate yourself. You told me once that you didn't understand what brought us together, but in the early morning, bleached light on hung over eyes, I see us for what we are. Time fades everything until we're only the black and white.

I could write you a novel, you know, sewing together the memories until you're everything I wanted you to be. But you are a lost boy, still fishing out of second story windows and sending me home alone. Your eyes follow me past street lights when you think I can't see. You know I may never come back, and sometimes I like to see you scared. I could write you stories of your voice in the dark, fighting the engine to be heard, before I grew up and got too old to listen. But tonight, I hate you and tomorrow may never come, so this is the last time, I promise. None of this ever has to happen again.