One of the differences between me and the person I love is that she has conversations with the sun and I have conversations with the graveyard outside my neighborhood. It makes for interesting chitchat. I’m sitting beside her having a picnic on the tombstones, and she talks to the sun and God and I talk to the dirt and the ghosts.

She asked me once how I would want to die. I thought to myself that I would want to be God.

And although I just shrugged, she smiled at me regardless and told me she would want to die as a savior. I thought that suited her because she had saved me in many times and in ways she’d never known. She would’ve wanted to die saving someone—grabbing a child out of the way of oncoming traffic, jumping in front of a bullet for someone she loved, dying so her last thought would be, “I’m scared to do this, but it’s right.” And then even afterwards, after she died and her spirit went wherever it does after one dies, her body would be donated to science. She had the best heart of anyone I knew; I think it would have been a successful heart transplant.

Regardless, I don’t think I’m enough of a control freak to be God.

I’m too indecisive to pick the times at which people, things, concepts would die.

When I was six years old, my sister cried over the squashed corpse of a caterpillar, and I wondered if God did the same.

When I was eighteen, my family cried when our family dog died, and I wondered if God cried too.

When I was twenty, I watched a cyclist get hit by a car, and I wondered if He cried over them, whoever they were. I didn’t cry, and I wondered if I would make a good God. I wondered if God ever battled superiority or His own type of God complex.

I wondered if She ever got pissed off over being misgendered.

We are still in the graveyard, lying on top of a blanket with the dandelions poking just past the edge, the words carved into the tombstone frowning at us with the curves of the letters. She argues they are smiling. She would make a better God than I. She would make a better God than He.

She makes the tombstones smile and the graveyard whisper compliments. I’ve always tried asking them questions—“Is it something I should really be scared of? Is there really a God, or are these whispers ghosts or my mind? What’s the point?”—but she tends to just have chitchat. She’s always been better at chitchat.

I’m staring at the words on a piece of glorified stone, wondering if there was a point, and she’s looking up at the sky. The dark clouds tumbled across; there are goosebumps on my legs.

“Why?” I ask her. I don’t elaborate, because I know she knows me well enough to know what I’m asking, what I’m always asking.

“Praying about the sun,” she answers.

“Why?”

“So she will come to see me. So she will stay.”

I smile at her gently and nod. I like the conversation.

She falls back against the blanket, her toes wiggling against the wet blades of grass, the softest blades I’ve ever touched.

“Hi,” she whispers to the sky as the clouds open up and omit the sunlight. “Welcome home.”

I get anxiety so bad that there’s a pain in the bottom of my stomach nibbling, going up, until it slinks into my chest and wraps around my ribs and injects itself into my heart. I get the shakes. I get impulses. I think about what I think death might be like, when my body is as cold and stiff as these tombstones, and my stomach does flips and my body paralyzes. I’m very scared of dying.

But then there’s her. I would write poetry about her and read it to the ghosts, even when I don’t believe in them or any God. I would trade my blood for ink so I would print her pages of the ways I love her.  I’d blow air into the sky to make clouds, and I’d pray for my breath to push away the clouds so she could always see the sun. She loves the writing, and I love her reading.

I feel like my bones ache all the time and my stomach is constantly burning in its own acid and my head hurts, especially when I think of death tying me down into a coffin.

Maybe this suffering will turn into poetry.