I send my writing to a boy who’s better at playing at being anyone else than he actually is at being himself. I’ve done it for years. I write something I’m proud of and I send it to him because no one else understands the power the courage it takes to put all of yourself out there quite like he does and no one else has ever understood my thoughts quite like he does. I sent him love stories. Snippets of memories I made with other people he’s never met, when I was fallen into their beds, a tangle of legs, sheets, and heartlines. I sent him suicide notes in the form of the internal monologue of a character designed after me. He read every goodbye I never had the courage to say out loud, to best friends and fathers and lovers. I sent him poem after poem after poem of aching hearts and rages against God. He told me, “It’s like every period is a different shade of blue.” I told him he was right, I’m outdoing Picasso. “Amateur only had one blue period.” I’ve got the deepest blue, almost black, bleeding all over my pages for the grief I’ve carried since I was seven, for sisters lost and a pain with depths as far reaching as the ocean. The sky poured its hue into my poems about heaven and a god who doesn’t deserve to be a god. Cobalt blue is the color my heart breaks in in every love story I write because it’s the color of a boy’s eyes. If you want to know why every period is blue I want you to know it’s because endings are prettier that way.