A room. My face pressed to your back breathing in the gap between your shoulders. Timing my inhales to your exhales catching the scent of your skin- fall, or something delicate, smokey. 

Playing images into the backs of my eyelids; you, sixty years older, reading the fading words of my journal. The pages permanently creased to the day we met.

September, the porch, every sign I knew I loved you from that moment up until they bury me decades later.

My fingertips still creating circles over your stomach turning night into morning.

Looking through me, behind me and my lonely grin into a mirror. But I’m looking at you through all this. I’m looking at you.

Note to self.

You, with the inaudible sound of regret wrapped within your throat:

Surprise.

Remember how you joked about having only yourself to trust? Look at us now relying on intuition, being more rude than inspiring. I promise to try harder if you promise to be better.

You let a silly girl harp on your heart strings but never thought to protect yourself in the aftermath. No doubt seeing her wildly calmed and contained in the arms of a friend took its toll; the image still firmly encapsulated in the most prominent area of your mind, free to pop up whenever you try to sleep. She’s most likely gone, but where is he?

For a while I’ve considered the possibility you were the one true masochist, allowing those you so desperately loved love you with half your dedication and take precedence over your own needs. So where are you now, and what have you to show for it aside from internet journals and an empty call log…

“Liars never prosper, cheaters never win.”

A personal motto, but we know this to be a comfort only to those of us on the losing end. How many times have we seen the deceptive reap the benefits of a full life while looming in the crowd waiting for their downfall? Too often it never comes, and still we have nothing to show for it.

Now you feel that same sinking feeling, paranoia performing tricks on the floor of your stomach, and you watch your love with frightening proficiency. You do what you can to avoid conjuring some self-fulfilling prophecy, but still you wonder if this is history or something else.

Do you remember when we used to plead with the kingdom of the sun? We’d run along the shoreline, the tide crashing swimming up around our ankles and stinging the cuts on the backs of our feet from shoes that never fit… the ocean was an ominous puddle reflecting the grey sky then and we thought we could keep the sun burning for us forever, even though we never could convince it to stay awake. We thought we were smart, but ended up being cursed by the complex naivety of our youth… “smart yet young.”

I wonder if there’s room to believe those two can exist in a sentence harmoniously.

I’m tired of reading notes about love, and how you triumphed over the way memories of me clung to you- “for all this time.”

But when I was dying and no one was looking for me I felt horribly unromantic. Why should I give anyone anything else different?

“So is this what it takes to separate the craving from the purpose, measured by success and not the motives of the heart?”

The greater the love, the greater the loss.

Here I am. 

Here I am at zero.

Here I am.

Here I am with less than nothing.

They say, “let’s be friends” as though we haven’t considered the option in one of ten thousand scenarios played out during the countless hours of sleep we’re not getting.

They say it so easily, with no more effort than it would take someone to blink. Of course they want to be friends, keep us at arm’s length and enjoy the benefits of our charms without taking on any of the baggage. Of course they want to be the heroes saving us from oblivion- and beyond. They’ve already removed themselves from the situation so they can avoid getting dragged into the undercurrent of all these bullshit feelings. But no one feels closer to the nuclear meltdown than the people giving birth to babies with two heads. So here’s my two-headed freak:

Fuck your friendship. Fuck the warm cozy images you played in your head that made you say it out loud. Fuck your hectic schedule and the way your mother doubted me because I wasn’t Muslim. Fuck your phone call. Fuck the pictures you drew of me as a lobster. Fuck your blasé attitude. Fuck the way your picture shows up under the headline, “[your name] will miss you,” when I deactivated my Facebook. Fuck your 2 a.m. text message that finally replied to the one I sent at 11. Fuck your feelings. Fuck your lack of them for me.

Fuck you.