Copper Bullet
It was sometime after the house party when you sat down next to me on the couch, laid your head on my shoulder, and asked "You don't mind, do you?" It was still after then when you smiled coyly, and answered yourself "No, I see the permission in your eyes." Yet it was before that weekend we woke up sharing a bed. It was months after the dinner where you said "How does your lips taste?" before brightly blushing... yet definitely before I asked if you wanted your own key.
Sometime during the ten months you were in my life I came to learn I loved you. Now that you're gone, I feel like you've taken with you a part of me.
It is the little things I can't forget.
You slipped out of bed and to the store, and were walking back with a dozen eggs and fixings for brunch.
The cross-fire copper bullet from the turf war perforated your lung with minimal entry cavitation. You tried to ask for help from the first responders to the scene, but had no air left to speak. They didn't realize you were in the wrong triage group until, at the last, you were in the right one. Now there's a you-shaped hole in my heart; my emotions weep out of it inexorably and slow. I cried a crick of disbelief and I cried a river of rage. I cried a lake of notnowno and I cried an ocean of pain.
And now my eyes are dry. And I cry "Never Again."