The Story of the Unfurling

The light is streaming through this day, and I haven’t seen you in seven nights, the air is dry on this sidewalk and everyone is suffering, it’s painful to watch. I can’t breathe without reliving your tracing of my flesh, a portrait of stills you can taste in my mind and every time I say a word aloud. Fingers to lips and it’s just you and me, I’m begging you don’t make this just another meaningless event locked up in your grandmother’s spare bedroom with an old wooden chair shoved snuggly under the latch. It’s so dark in here and I think I need to go, but just stay awhile, I’ve been waiting for you.

Don’t kiss me with your mouth open, you’re not even paying attention to the way my limbs shutter at the thought of it. Enough of this euphemistic shit, is this what you wanted? If desire were your meal ticket, you’d starve in your meager three-walled closet, the salt welling up in the back of your throat and you can hear the carols being sung under the street lamp outside. You’re shaking and rocking and the blisters are sprouting up at every inch of your body. Today is like any day, and I’m just like any girl who cries out on the inside because she’s craving attention and you know it. This is your modus operandi, quite cowardly for a man with eyes that tell a story never told, one that will ultimately mean nothing more than those black and red flannel undies you ripped off of my tender, milk-fed body.

This is the meeting mister, you’re scribbling something hard and fast and the lines start to disappear, or do they run away in fear? This is what you showed me once, we were kicking the sand out from under our toes with the night staring down on us, and I swear with your head back and laughing, I convinced myself I was wrong. I’d touch your face and I was touching my own, staring into a world of. My life was predicated on writing the storybook pages in black and white, and you illustrated the silhouette of my lips with your eyes closed and your heart stopped, the night stopped, where are we?

“It’s OK, she can’t hear us.”

“Where should I put my bags?”

“I’ll take them. You need a bath, so I’ll sit right here.”

“Are you just going to watch me?”

“You’re beautiful, and I can’t help but watch you. Here, let me help you with that.”

“No, it’s fi—“

The buzzer went off, and I knew our time was up. That was thirteen years ago, and call it just two or a few months or it was yesterday, it was a different time then and aching says it’s so. It never happened, and it will happen again, and again and again and this is what creeps out from under our beds at night, never casting a shadow and self-deconstructing as it plays to the sound of my heart beating so rapidly, I think I’ll die right here with my eyes wide open and my teeth clinched on either side of these blood-stained sheets.

You lie there, pale green is not very flattering on you, neither is the rest of the world or anything else for that matter and I hate you for what you’ve done to me. It was warm in that backseat, my skin came up out of itself, this audacious display of your sickness and you shared me with crushed velveteen and midnight passersby. I waited for it, and I had once or a thousand times calculated every moment, every time you touched me and made a woman out of my girlish hands.

I, just like all of the others.