How to Stop Running Away

when we were five,
we argued and fought
all of the time,
but we both loved to laugh,
and we grew up
smiling in all of our pictures.
we ran laps around
muddy soccer fields,
and never thought twice
about growing up,
but there weren't enough years
between elementary school
playgrounds
and
ignoring speed limits,
never enough space
between your hands
and the habits
that fell into them.
when we were sixteen,
you drank oceans of liquor
and tried to drown
in the middle of a parking lot,
but couldn't quite keep
the slurred pleas for help
from your eyes,
and I learned how to swim
through tides
of careless words
and empty bottles
to bring you back to shore.
when we were seventeen,
you craved fire
and found solace in
burning cigarettes and letting
the nicotine coat your lungs
that used to remember
what it was to breathe
in the warmth of a home.
your mind became a prison
and you blamed the world
for your captivity,
spewing anger and hate
into my face
as I convinced myself that
only
hurting people
hurt people.
when we were eighteen,
you made sidewalks
and street signs your friends
and wandered through
town in a daze,
days spent flicking the lighter
and watching it burn
too bright.
you stopped laughing
and traded happiness for
cocaine
instead of applying to art school,
crumpled your future
and promised to forget,
and I remembered
our five year old selves
racing around the soccer fields
and dug through dusty
boxes of trophies
and childhood innocence
to find some sign
that you still existed.
when we were at our breaking point,
you stopped showing up
at school
and didn't cover your tracks,
and everyone around you
warily laughed off the days
when you forgot what to say
in the middle of sentences
and walked into door frames
like it was a joke.
when we called your sisters,
they stopped answering
their phones,
and your parents didn't want
to know the details
of the scars that started
appearing on your wrists.
when we were eighteen,
we lost you to
someone else's story
and I woke up
after each nightmare
begging you not to jump
down from overpasses
and the tops of buildings.
when we didn't know what else to do,
you finally looked in the mirror
and
i spent the night
crying tears of relief
as you drove to rehab
on the other side of the state.
when we were eighteen,
i finally stopped running in circles,
and you stopped
running away.