blessed be the ashes of our love,

gathered into the holiest of urns.

made sacred by the moments lost,

ashes kept caged by frozen momentum,

the inability to let go of the past.

you asked that our love be set free,

ashes tossed towards the clouded sky

until they began to meld together as one,

a solid, uniform grey that paints the world

in shades of our shared discontent.

but i could not honor your request,

kept the ashes lost in the vault of my heart

that has become an eternal urn.

i carry what remains of you within me,

cannot accept that there's nothing left.

sometimes i hear your ashes whisper

from deep within their cage of bones,

they beg me to honor your wishes

and every day they grow heavier, more insistent,

as they plead for sweet release that i can't provide.

i'm weighed down by your remains

the scale is tipping towards me

threatening to spill me into the void.

i cannot set you free, even while you beg,

and even though i know it'll doom me too.

my stomach begins to grow

with parasitic love you planted.

you begged me to flush it away,

with pills or twisted wire hangers

or a sterile hospital room in illinois.

i was convinced that i needed to keep it inside,

to honor the memory you left behind.

but it's beginning to hurt, an ache deep within

that spreads every passing day since you left:

not just in my body but in my mind.

is life a gift that i'm qualified to give

in honor of a man that i no longer have?

i'm living on my mother's dime and working dawn 'til dusk.

is that a world that can support

the weight of your parasitic husk?

you begged me to let it go,

and at the time i couldn't understand why.

so desperately clinging to you,

i did not understand the weight of life.

it's tearing me apart, skin is wearing thin

you warned me that this is what i needed,

that eighteen is far too young.

i thought it was your fear of commitment

that prompted your declaration of dying love.

but you knew our love was already dying.

and now our love lives in a new form,

distorted by loss and time.

it's a life i cannot continue to live,

drained of all my time,

supporting the ashes of you until the end of the line.

i booked the appointment, i made the drive

drove past the protesters calling me a killer.

and using the money i'd been scrambling to save,

i freed the last vestiges of our love from my stomach,

and i am now faced with a new weight of moving on.

a mere clump of cells, absent of its form.

i freed it from a life that i couldn't support.

it never had to face the burden of sentience

and i never had to face the burden

of being trapped with you forever.

and the ashes of our love are tossed from the cliffs,

sent into a cerulean sea of dreams.

i am moving on like you asked me to,

and maybe now i can look for scholarships,

and go to college like i dreamed.

some may deem me a sinner,

some may hail my independence.

but i am not cursed, nor am i innocent.

but blessed be the ashes of our love,

even as they are lost to the mist.