At first: I’m smudged into the dirt patch behind your house, tacked to the chickenwire fence. You hate me for the scuffs on your shoes and the stains in your closet. When you’re around, your smell takes me over and turns me to stone. I’m nothing but dead weight. I sit in the corner, playing myself, pretending I’m still asleep. The pointed toe of your boot cracks my throat with all the weight of your spit. You cry by proxy.
Earlier, maybe: Rain, sable with heat, breaks through my face. You’re still, staring upwards, climbing the ropes of ink, tying careful knots across your button nose. I’m hardly here, pulled to pieces as your lips shear apart, revealing pebbles, belts, oil, poison.
Then, again: I’m propped against your headboard in an imitation of sitting, knees drawn high around my sternum to hold me upright. One of your pillows is behind my back to keep me from staining the wood, but the gaping cavity of my ribs is leaking onto your sheets. All of my organs have been carefully removed, and when you hold your pearl white hands up to my still face I can smell my insides from under your long fingernails. When my head falls loose, you cradle my chin between your fingers until my grey lips are parallel with your own. I disgust you. I must. You lift your legs so you can mirror my pose, but when your weight shifts the mattress pulls from under me and I collapse, crumpling onto the floor in front of you.
Whenever: ██████████ is leaning against the shut door of the pantry, black pants and a green sweater. ████ eyes are shut, head down, and ████ arms are pressed in a delicate cross over ████ stomach. I can’t tell what, but ████’s got something in ████ hands. I’m across the table, reading to ████ about mat-making, runes and men, the world that summer, cripple nations, boys in grocery bags spread across fifty states. Beautiful faces. With every punctuation mark, I glance up to trace the minute parting of ████ soft pink lips across the doorway, beaded bracelets falling over ████ shifting knuckles. Body and soul, I give to you.
Later on: Another tepid death trip night. I’m sitting up on a wet spot on the mattress, trying hard not to vomit or waste my time. Reading some filth, listening to venetian blinds (“boy boy boy”); I’ve decided this is what being happy is all about. I glance over at my windowpane tonic water and try not to think about you. “You’re busy, I’m easy,” I say to nobody in particular. Water business. That’s all it is.
Now, finally: I'm imagining now choking to death right now. I think the best way to do it would be a mouthful of your three pounds down of inky hair. Then, dead, I become something that you really need. Truly, absolutely need. My bloated, wasted body rests soundly in linoleum grout and toothpick reflection. You, any time you want, can have me. Can have anything, any other dust-sucking reject fucked nightly by cambodge slot and TC rot. Don't I? An unmitigated disaster in psychic terrorism. Isn't it? Once more, my greatest and only love.