I made a back room deal with myself to never tell you what I did on that beautiful, grass-stained hill that was covered in near-absolute darkness and the terror of feeling an outrageous amount of blood soaked into my shirt. Not knowing for sure whose it was. I had hoped it was mine, but that would have been too easy. I never wanted you to know, but now they’ve got me, and you need to hear it from me first. I did something terrible and irrevocable that night. My body felt like MacBeth’s dagger.

I am my own flawed logic. I am my own reason for sleeping too much when you aren’t around. I exist against my own better judgment. I won’t go outside. I get my own better of me. I am an act of defiance. If I let you go, I’ll be stuck with myself, so now you know.

I wake up in the morning determined to be the worst version of myself. I work on the little things I do right, and I fail at them on purpose. I become a cavity to a world that has been nothing but kind to me. I destroy everything from the inside out. Why the fuck not?

Please swear you’ll never become a better person. I don’t have it in me to change, and I don’t want to lose you if you’re too good for me one day.

I know most people would find it inconvenient that every time I fake my own death, you bump into me at the market or movie theatre, and I have to fake my death again just to shake you, but I don’t look at it like that. I’m happy enough that you still fall for it every time after all these years.

She insisted on listening to Nirvana and Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. She closed her eyes and called them “beautifully tragic” or some bullshit. She was obsessed with guys who killed themselves, and that’s why she was with me, I knew. She only started dating me after my failed suicide when I was out and bitter to be alive. She had ignored me for years before that, and then we were together as soon as she thought I could be like one of those assholes she played on her stereo. I could die, and she could tell everyone how wonderful my poems and short stories were but never show them those awful wrecks to prove it. That bitch. Even on my worst days from then on, I refused to even entertain the idea of suicide as my own kind of revenge. She could suffer with me being alive and happy until I die of old age.

We perfected a sort of time travel where we could relive, refeel any moment from the past, but we couldn’t change a thing. Everything happened exactly how it happened the first time. At first, we relived our happiest moments together. Our first night together. Our wedding day. Shit like that. Increasingly, though, we used it to solve arguments. Who said they’d pick the kids up from school. Promises we made years ago. We couldn’t forgive because someone was clearly wrong. We could go back and see that. We couldn’t forget. We were playing our hells on repeat to solve decade old fights. It became a contest of who did more things wrong to the other, and the good moments never happened again and were never revisited.

You told me it isn’t a game of chicken if you believe in God enough. You walked out into traffic, and I tried to get to you, but the cars all swerved around you, cutting me off. “This is all part of His plan,” you yelled over the sound of traffic and a twisted orchestra of car horns. I knew then it was a mistake to take you to church high. Even before you laid down and a stream of cars washed over you.

I want you to know you are all the best parts of me. Well, ever since I mined you for organs to replace the wreckage that was my insides. I’m so grateful, I’ll be sure to drink to you at your funeral. Now that I can drink again.

Before this date starts, I should warn you that I often go into psychotic fits of murderous rage. It should be fine as long as we avoid my triggers. I don’t have time to list them all, but here are the ones that may be relevant for tonight: food, movies, holding hands, Care Bears, being dumped, and not having sex on first dates. Now what did you have in mind?