Maybe if I tried hard enough the lights would grow dimmer. The police cars that swarmed the street. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I was not the one who was broken.

Maybe lying in the street, staring up at the sky could make me forget. Though what would forgetting do? The people yelling and asking if I was okay. Was I okay? I knew who wasn’t. Jumping into a city street wasn’t something a person does. Maybe you weren’t as okay as you said you were. I should’ve known something was off in November, when you just stopped. Stopped responding. It took 5 attempts to get you to say anything. An indicator that you were still inside your corpse. That there was still someone under that hoodie. 

The day after your results came in should have told me something. Something that would have shown that I should have just left, and not get myself tangled in your life. The way that you wouldn’t stop talking. About how your friends hated you. How your parents called you a failure. I tried to convince you that you weren’t. But I can’t lie. And after a week of talking and talking and trying to convince you that you weren’t who you thought you were, you stopped. Stopped doing everything. You never touched a basketball after that ever again. You ripped up your jersey and shoved it in the dumpster in the alleyway on the side of your apartment. You set fire to the basketball hoop in the park. You never attended another track meet. You threw out your running shoes. You shoved all your Jordans to the back of your closet.

And then you stopped responding. It took 20 minutes to get you to eat an Oreo. I didn’t know why I cared so much. I just didn’t want to accept that you were dead inside. I wouldn’t go to parties, because you didn’t like them after and I was too scared to let you roam the streets by yourself. I didn’t draw another picture again because you hated seeing colors that weren’t black and white. The only thing you liked after you broke was the city lights. You liked it when your vision hazed and the lights became crystalline circles of hues that overlapped. You said that it was different from my markers, which overtook your vision and reminded you of the basketball finals, where they blasted music and after the game they poured down buckets and buckets of confetti that took forever to take out of your hair.

You said the city lights were soft. They didn’t take over the world that you liked to keep gray. I didn’t take over the world when you hazed up.