Don't Let It Get You, and I....

Won't let it get to me.

Tonight and a dark bar where you can't hardly see the company unless you’re looking hard enough. $5 glasses of Merlot and $1 off whiskey because Wednesday. Because the girl you know is leaving and the bar didn’t know but they seem to sympathize anyways. Jubelale tells you the season has changed, winter on a summer-drunk tongue. Your focus funneled into pool cues and angles and an impossible shot made possible by the sheer physics of luck.

Every time I tell the story it becomes more true. The crying. The leaving. Even in this place where past and future chafe against the thin membrane of memory. I don't remember the sloped parking lot. The bar where I handed the waitress my phone, asked her to call us a cab because even my monocular vision couldn’t procure us a ride home. Here is what I remember: the parking lot like a ski slope for beginners, no rope to guide us home. The Christmas tree refuses to grow in the corner you’ve allotted, and I think that must be a metaphor,

In the parking lot where we stumbled and weaved the dark-haired memory tells me I was never meant to follow. Tells me I was born to have dreams. And I laugh, say the parts of myself still connected to you feel bruised. Tell her some day I’ll heal, but tonight I feel like an open wound. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for but it’s more than this. Hours ago, an impossible angle and a reckless shot, the 8-ball sinking into the corner pocket and even strangers have to sigh for the luck of it all. Perhaps these hands are more skilled than they know. Perhaps these hands know the path they are supposed to follow.

My therapist says it’s time to let go, says she can help me through alone but hope is a dangerous emotion. She can’t navigate the breadth of this emptiness, You. Do you know I still think of you at night? Wish the smell of you had stained my pillows, spoiled me to any future suitors' advances. There are times I feel like my sadness has chummed the waters of their affections, caused these hapless heartbreaks to rise to the challenge, hell bent on erasing this you that I still cling to. Is tragedy a thing, or its absence? I’m never quite sure.

I fear the morning, that still, quiet gray. My breath unfolding around me like a whisper. Like an apology. Everything is so different than I’d hoped everything might be. Even the feel of you against my bare feet: foreign like the countries we’ll never see together. Imagine Spain. Australia. Scotland. These places our breath has never mingled in dark alleys or hostels. Never risen off of each other's skin to be born again.

The dark parking lot where I’m buying cigarettes and the olive green shirt in dark-rimmed glasses asks how my day is. I say Can’t hardly complain and he laughs so soft his shoulders don’t move. See, he’s been having the same day too. As soon as I leave he’ll crawl back into the store, prop an elbow on the counter like the memory of a bar, and spill his stories. But I will be too far gone to hear. I watch my breath puddle around the cold.

I am too far gone to hear. I am too far. I am gone.

-b