If beauty really was truth you'd be the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Of course, you're not, so that old saying is hardly valid. Still, you lie – to yourself and to your mother and to your best friend and possibly to everyone but me. No, scratch that – you're lying to me too, but not with your words.

No, you lie to me by only holding my hand when we're away from spying eyes and you lie to me by only kissing me when you know no one's around.

The only things that doesn't seem like it's hidden under a thick fucking duvetof lies are your eyes – your brilliant green eyes that watch me across the schoolyard when I send up smoke signals that are three quarters poison nicotine and one quarter new winter air. You hate it when I smoke but you can't cause a scene here, when we are watched, so you try to listen to Stan and I ignore Cartman and we look at each other, having a fight that no one notices.

You hate it when I smoke and you hate it when I drink and you claim that I deserve more than this but, baby, what else can I do? The nicotine caresses me with it's soothing poison and the vodka is the only thing that keeps me warm during the nights when you leave to stay at Stan's or go home to your family. Youstill have warmth and love when you leave me.

I have my dad's old truck and we, the ones that live in the ghetto, will drive too fast with our heads out the windows and our lives on the line, howling and screaming until our lungs give out and then we will stop, go back and light a fire and dance and drink and try to stay alive, stay warm, survivebecause that's all we can do. Our lives are more or less all we have.

The nights that you don't leave, we stay inside, in my room and you always bring your sleeping bag and inside of it, with you, there's so much more warmth than the alcohol and the dance and the fire can give me. I try to describe it to you but you will never listen because thinking of it hurts you. Baby, I like that you seem to care so much for me, but don't you realize that I too need to talk about things that trouble me?

Because you never listen you will never know what it's really like for me and even if you'd listen you'll never know half of it. I made a list of all the things you don't know about me, once, but I stopped writing after that and you will never know that all those old poems and texts in a box at the bottom of my closet were for you because you can't take my writing, either.

Sometimes I don't know why you love me, or why I love you, but I know that goodbye is not an option because I refuse to have it in my vocabulary – which is ironic, really, since I never know when death eventually will be final – and maybe, in the end, that will cause me to hold on to you only because I've never really learned how to let go.