Leftovers

All the wine glides over my tongue a little rougher than your lips used to. In a way, it satisfies completely but the trip we never took pulls at the frays to create a bigger hole than I intended and the satisfaction is no longer satisfactory. Neither is it unsatisfactory. It just isn't you.

My hair is redder now.
You'd hate it.
My collar bones scream louder and the ring on my right hand slips off sometimes and I still can't cook but he doesn't really mind.  You said you'd get funny again but I knew it wasn't true because the half moons under your eyes never went away and you hands never got warm and you stopped walking to the kitchen to eat leftovers in the middle of the night. And I know I didn't say anything but it's because I watched and I knew you better than you knew me and that's the way it always would have been and you know you would have hated it so your argument that's already forming in your head won't make a difference to me.

My coffee still gets cold and my hair still gets knotted and I still cry every once and a while. And you still don't do anything about any of it and that's why you had to go.
Or, rather, I did.
There is no apology.  Your words are powerless to mine just as they always have been. I still can't stand to see you with her and she probably hates me and you probably do too and I have to sit here and chew my nails and wipe my tears and never let anyone but the cat see so the frays in my sweaters don't turn into gaping holes and you don't slide between the cracks I made in my very own conscience.

There is no apology. But I'm so, so sorry.

Heavy Boots

It was colder now.  She kept his flannel but gave the hat back. 

She didn't look good in it anyway. 

The music that kept her sane was hollow and tired and faded now. Or maybe it's just that she was. 

She still wore her hair in a knot on the top of her head and she stopped looking at herself in the mirror because her eyes had changed their color and her collar bones bruised easily. The black cursive words on her ribcage meant nothing to him now and the freckle next to her belly button became slightly darker like a negative being developed in some vacant darkroom.  Her hip bones got sharper and her knees grew softer and the bottoms of her feet still had the calluses from walking beneath the overpass at sunset on his birthday.  

Those words on that icy, rough, grainy cement wall still meant everything to her though. 

Or maybe it's just that he still did. 

Image.

Music.

Text.

But not in that order.

Barthes had it wrong. So did she, now that he finally asked. Conceptual bullshit doesn't make anything tangible, she knew now.  And her boots were molded exactly to the shape of her feet but it didn't make it any easier to walk and it definitely didn't make them any lighter and the black coffee she preferred over Earl Grey now (your taste buds change every seven years, he told her) grew colder than that cement wall but she never poured it into the already-crowded sink.  

She never poured him down there either.  After all the strangers, the brunettes from New York or Miami or out west or wherever, got washed down that sink or perhaps placed with the neglected dishes because there aren't enough spots on her body to etch all those tattoos and that's why she had to get rid of them. 

It was probably the end. 

You should probably just say it. 

Saying it makes it real.

Because then you can stop convincing yourself of the delusional validity of all the conceptual bullshit and realize that you kissed them and not him and there isn't an excuse you didn't use and the writing is still there and you don't like Earl Grey tea anymore and you still walk by every year on his birthday with heavier boots than the year before. 

http://feelingcopasetic.blogspot.com/

how to be less

He realized then that he never really asked.  

Maybe he didn't want to know.

Maybe he know it so well to be true that he'd rather pretend that it wasn't.

Maybe he knew she'd never tell him the truth.

After all, she probably wouldn't. 

She wore too many rings and she hated her tattoo. Her boots were ripping at the soles and her hair was quite literally never done. She said Dali confused her but that's why she liked him. She said hats looked bad on her and there was always the smell of Marlboro Reds on her fingers. And she apologized daily because she knew he hated the smell and the taste and the habit. She did apologize, but she never did quite quit. 

He realized then that he never asked. Because he knew this answer already: without her, he'd be less.  

Less a person, less in love, less a warm body to roll over to in the morning. There is no accurate way to end something like that because the blood will be everywhere and you'll be less a friend to help clean it up. 

They always walked because she hated the way he drove. 

"Go faster," she said. 

He obliged. But not enough.

He didn't want to know because it would mean the end of something like that and the blood would be everywhere and he would be less a friend to help clean it up. 

The salty air was bitter on his tongue and he wished he could taste her Marlboro Red again.  The beauty of togetherness had turned uglier than the sloppy words sprayed complacently on the wall. His "something bigger than himself" had gone on to hell, and he was left homeless under that overpass. 

 http://iboughtmyeyes.blogspot.com/

I prefer Earl Grey.

"I don't want a home anymore," she breathed. Exasperated was, most definitely, an understatement.  

The wheels of her bike turned faster and she pushed harder to reach the top, the paved blocks smoothing out and getting left behind her. She kept telling me how she didn't like herself anymore. I told her I liked her even more. 

There was a point where, maybe because of the cold or maybe because of the cigarettes, that I couldn't tell whether the sun was rising or setting.  The light hit the edges of the buildings lining the river and I walked at the same speed as the water. Every boat was rusted and fearsome; the people that I imagined on them were even more so, like the ones who fought through the depths of the Amazon with a machete and a cigar and a novel in tow, with hearts of darkness and boots of steel. Not her cup of tea. Not really mine either.  I prefer Earl Grey. 

Summer was a thing of the past. It was children's books with coffee stains and falling asleep halfway through a movie marathon.  It was castles that were home to no one and laughter recorded on a loop as to preserve it's space and sound in time but by the time you go back and listen to it, it's already as stale as Sunday's black coffee still marinating on the nightstand on Thursday.  You couldn't taste its warmth, not that you might want to. 

I don't really like black coffee anyway.  Even after a chilled bike ride in a too-thin coat at sunset. 

I prefer Earl Grey. 

http://foreignertypes.blogspot.com/

Hermosa

Driving away is harder than running.
Running allows the time to pass slower. The destination is farther. The taste of salt lasts longer on red sunburnt lips.

But to slam the door on an old Jeep and take off is too much momentum too soon, especially for something that you wish would hang in the late summer air forever.

It is not so much of a road as a string. Something that connects something else, ties it together for safe keeping; at least until the knot becomes loose over time and the string breaks into threads as thin as the friendships that could once sink ships and while you miss that body, that laugh, those shoes, that one hair that never stayed in place as much as he tried, you can't miss it because it forces that to surface. It forces you to acknowledge the fact that there are others like me. You were another blink of those eyes that once cried for you, another sunset that he can watch out his window every evening at 7:38 (or 6:38 when the light grows shorter).  You are a grain of sand on that beach in Hermosa and she's there with her toes in the ocean and her short blonde hair not free enough to be carried in the wind.

You're not sad.
You don't miss it.
You don't miss the faded almost-white denim and the feet soft from sand.
You don't miss him it.
You don't miss it.
You don't miss that road, the string that held your hair back from the harsh wind and the string that held your hand to his.
You're not sad.

I don't miss it. 

http://myconstellationprize.blogspot.com/

Flight

Supposing is an awfully awful thing to do.

Acceptance: Now that is much more appropriate.

Wonder: Maybe even better. 

This is where hunger is essential, and thirst is only ever satisfied with another crash of another wave, is where the deepest of sleeps is possible.  Even then, who sleeps nowadays?

Fingers and hair curl oh so naturally, and the wind seems to be enough for breakfast. Clothes become soaked and crisped, drenched and parched repetitively but in the best sense. Worries have mostly to do with whether the nearing waves are full of dinner or predator, although either are welcomed with open arms and sails. 

Perhaps the easiest supposition is that this will not last forever. After all, what starts this abruptly will certainly end as such. 

"Let's be nothing," she says, drunk from sun and sangria. "I hear it lasts forever."

Their voices float across the salty scape and drift along, effortlessly yet purposefully, through the atmosphere, past the cumulus, and into whatever they believed was above that for the moment. Not heaven exactly, but some place where it is always dusk and their glasses are never empty and the music is one guitar that he plays not well, but decently, and skins are always tanned, and everyone has a way of communicating without too much certainty or language in general.  

I suppose we flew there, to that place, in that time, but I wonder still if I could call it mine.