15

I'm still wearing the red lusted lipstick he hates as I try to explain that it's impossible to wash this disease away. My father says I'm a picture of teenage cliches, mourning puppy love as if it is something tangible, him, always one to rip the band aid from the wound, quick and with only the slightest sting of nostalgia. He wonders why he was cursed with the mass of emotions bleeding before him. "It's later than midnight..." he says, but they are everywhere, dampening my hair, flailing into my mouth already creasing into the laugh lines and fleeting moments of yesterday. My father wanted the boy, five years younger and dead before born but all he got was this: frayed heart and torn jeans, sheet stains from two kinds of melted foundations, the moist aftermath that I will swallow in sleep, as the constant question marks adorn his face.