I.
When my body collapsed on the cold wood floor, I cried until sunrise. I still had spittle on my face from the officer who stopped me on my way home because I was driving recklessly and weeping. I like to pretend he just stopped me for the weeping.
Maybe he was Jesus. But you don't like when I talk about God. So, I won't say that.
The first question he asked me was, "Miss, have you had anything to drink? You were going 60 in a 40." Choking down salty snot, canals of mascara coursing into my mouth, and small chunks of hair that had wandered past my lips I stammered:
"N-n-nooo officer. I am j-j-j-u-st v-v-eery s-sad. Y--you see, I jusst got brr-rrok--en uuu-p wwwith. Ann-d it i-s thhhree a.m. and I wwannt to get soomee sleeeeeep."
He smirked and gently touched my hand and said:
"Go home. Go to bed now. You are young and beautiful. It is going to be okay."
I pressed the weight of my body into the floor, turned on my back and studied the ceiling.
"It's going to be okay." I breathed.
"Flora, it's going to be okay."
II.
Yesterday, I took a shower for the first time since you touched me. I washed your mouth and tongue and words and tears off of me. And you were gone.
I want you to stay gone-like a sepia-tone memory that locks itself away in a box at the top of my closet. I want to forget you. I want to forget your strong arms, the lines of the ocean on your skin, the hair on the top of your toes and the way your perfect thighs feel absorbed in mine. I want my brain to un-encode the smell of you. I want my flesh to stop turning itself inside out every time I picture you tugging on my belt loop.
When I pass you by accident in a local coffee shop, I want you to be so far removed that your face is as foreign as a dilapidated house, on a forgotten street in a far away country with a name I cannot pronounce. I want to wash you out of my sheets, my clothes, my hair, my bloodstream and the fraying fibers of my countenance. I want to forget about congregating at tables full of minions with same faces saturated in the dull murmur of grey conversations. I want to forgive you for washing out my exuberance, demanding I did not speak, suffocating my creativity and dangling yourself on a string that I could never quite jump high enough for because...
Well, you were just too good for me.
Thank you for lowering your standards long enough to give me the opportunity to be ravished by you and your fame.
You are good at everything.
Now, my lonely fingers are untangled and confused about where to weave. I am angry you took my painting away. I sit down at my vacant desk and touch my new brushes. But you smell like acrylic and polyurethane.
I touch them. I pretend I am the same.
But I am not the same.
Maybe you are right. Maybe the losses we cut were really nooses tightening around our necks. Maybe the severing saved us. We talked once about how the body still fights for life even after death has taken over. I proposed it was because we are made in the image of God.
I cannot stop the stirring.
My muscles and tendons ache and twitch and tingle.
My heart and spirit faints.
It is a slow decline into the grey.
