I want to let you know that
I still have that crocodile you made me,
And that I've never stopped worrying about you.
You are an introverted black hole, a pit of self-reflection which, knowing that no light can ever escape it, has decided to spit out its darkness, a whirlpool of creativity and prescription medication hiding inside of itself a whole civilization.
You are the single craziest person I've ever met,
And that's not just because of your stay in the mental hospital, but because of your beautifully melted worldview and expectations.
Your mind is a Salvador Dali painting I somehow can manage to appreciate,
A Goosebumps book with character development,
Dubstep that doesn't make me want to kill myself.
You weren’t my first friend who I worried about killing themselves.
Or the first I ever had to talk down,
(That honor belongs to the now-homeless girl back in eighth grade).
But you were always the scariest.
Congratulations.
You know that if I thought I could protect you, I would.
But while helping chase away your demons I kept running full speed into brick walls
Because it gets harder to help,
Once you've escaped the system,
Now that your devils are all self-imposed
And now that your good days and bad
Are all keyed in to differently-colored pills.
I just keep looking at that stuffed crocodile you gave me
Right before you graduated.
I always thought it was funny,
How it looked like it was baked.
Then you had your first breakdown -
The first that I was there for, anyways -
And that night I threw the damn thing across my room.
You know, my greatest hope for you is that you break the typical artist cliche,
Because your art is beautiful,
Your book was better,
And your poetry was always the best.
And while I may have found it funny that your crocodile looked baked,
There wasn't anyone laughing when they found Sylvia Plath’s head in the oven.