HOW TO FALL APART AND GET STITCHED BACK TOGETHER // DALLAS WINSTON

the poem

i wrote this on december 1st, when i was seventeen years old. the same day that i would have started dating dallas, if all of this was real:

dallas my darling,

i wish i could begin to explain to you the difference between where i am now and where i thought that i would be today. tonight rather. tonight with you. stomping across winter grounds with that shirt hidden beneath my puffy winter coat. the way that i would have enticed you in with my words and my subtle suggestions. i thought about it earlier on the bus ride home. the way that i must have been like a goddess to you. walked straight out of a seashell by the brush stroke of god and stumbled into your bedroom. except, you're not real. this fact used to shatter me everyday but now it's just accepted. you became more like an old friend i watched drift away. i have learned to find, real, people and they are really pleasant. i have began to understand myself better, too. contrastingly to where i thought i would be i am also over seven hundred days clean. oh, and do you wanna know something great, dallas? im a boy now. i think that's pretty great. i have spent less time searching for you. which i think is good. it was a sysphiean task. i am going to have a bowl of cereal for dinner. what are you having for dinner? oh? you're not having anything? because you're not real? well, i know you are somewhere. somewhere, out in some distant universe, you are. but i am not your god anymore, dallas. i am merely a newfound man doing his best to survive in his own life, nevermind make yours. so this is me letting you go. thank you for getting me through everything when i needed you the most. i still get the chills if i think about it too much. tell everyone else that i'll miss them too. tell them to enjoy their own lives and make the best out of what they have, and i'll do the same thing. i created you. i am the reason that you are alive. and you are the reason that i am alive, too.