​the cowards that we are.

2nd Person Perspective. Wordcount: 331

The shed is small. It barely fits the two of us, let alone Him. The world has narrowed impossibly, smaller and smaller, just me and you and… well. Lungs full of sawdust. If the sin doesn’t kill us, the suffocation will. My sneakers are nearly worn through the soles and your lip is bloody. He’s looking at you and then He’s looking at me, saying words that are untranslatable. I look at your shattered-glass eyes and I look at the padlock and in this moment I realize that there is no world in which we survive this.

None. No matter how we stumble through that door with our bodies mostly intact, some septic, essential piece of us is going to still be here, in this moment. You and your insipid innocence, me and my ruinous faith. I dig my nails into my arm. I cough up sawdust. I listen to His voice, watch his hands. I hate you now as if I’ve always hated you.

In ten years, when you have a car and I have a boyfriend but neither of us have deleted His number from our fucking phones, a month after I set those heartless sneakers on fire in my parents backyard, we’re going to be sitting in your basement and you’re going to say to me with a shaky voice, do you remember it? Like you want to talk. Like you think we have anything to talk about. And I will think of sawdust. Of the brother I always wanted to tell and the boyfriend that knows something is wrong with me but doesn’t want to push.

I will think of sulfur and the God that didn’t save us and the pieces of me locked in that tiny fucking woodshed that I’m still too scared to retrieve. Of our skeletons locked away in silence, and on that day I’ll finally give you a busted lip for condemning us to this. For making us the cowards that we are.