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My Boyfriend Met My Parents At My Funeral

He shook their wilted hands, moved to the fifth row, wept openly beside his mother whom I’d met one month prior at a Thai restaurant. He was Flat Stanley. Paper-pale. Forced into attendance. My cleanly slit wrists had been stitched with animal intestines and my skin glowed like it had been drizzled in sap. I wanted my boyfriend to stand up, to stop crying and say something. Maybe about how I was good, through and through, or about the time I begged him to fuck me in the ass and he wouldn’t. Surely these people wanted new information. Transformation. Something they could cling to, ensuring my soul would stretch out like gum. On and on and on.

For weeks after the funeral, my boyfriend will claim I am calling to him from the beyond. He will confide this to his sister after an afternoon binging noir films. He will tell her, all the other people are ghosts. She is the thing that’s real. I will claw at the casket, click my tongue against my teeth, and say, my darling, we’ve been through this, love is never as good as help.