August 08, 2009 - 4:42 a.m.
I have walked out the door for the umpteenth time
this time serious
and I sit in the stairwell, counting
seconds, counting the number of beads on my key chain, counting my heartbeats
waiting until my pulse slows, until i feel like I will no longer throw up
I am done with this.
still, I don't feel that I should have to be the one to leave. Not me, not this time, not in these circumstances.
And she is too drunk to even know what is happening.
Leaving is not poignant to an alcoholic.
She is passed out on her pillow in my bed. The pronouns are deliberate.
Someone once said, 'i will never date someone who has nothing to offer that I can't give myself'
what do you offer exactly?
Not money. Not tenderness *except when you're wasted and are trying to back peddle. Not furniture. Not help with my career. Not support with my career. Not...
Everything you have to give me is promises.
So far what have you kept?
When you bark, it is incessant. When you stop barking your bite holds all the promise of the teeth, the lips and the flesh parting.
"Go! Throw some of your shit in a bag and leave. Go to your parents'. Maybe I'll invite her over. Go ahead. She makes me feel attractive."
"like a client?..."
How do you trust someone who has never had to change for anyone?
How can you trust someone who makes empty words into castles of house and home and rings and... bullshit. Because none of it was ever true, even in their mind. Because when they're being true to themselves, in the clouds of lager and brown glass, the only true thing is that they like to brag about their smoking and sex and their charm which is only a vague memory since you can't remember the last time that was true either.
But wrapped in these layers of intertwined lives, you can never be sure how to extract yourself from the weave without causing your entire self to unravel.
Tell me on a Sunday' doesn't work in real life. cold inside my skin. sick in my teeth. so tired. so tired. so tired of the same shit.
and there you are sleeping again. leaving me with so many more reasons, the same reason, more reasons, to start mentally packing my bags, filling them with you
... waiting to be sure of how to discard the body without losing too much of myself in the process. I don't even know what I would look like without the waste of you on me... the circles under my eyes and calouses on my heels because I have been dragging myself through this, tied to you.
I keep running into old mirrors of you and I, face to face with the stories we told. You were brazen in their transmission and now, I feel like the only way to get myself back is to refute them in cold blood. As she tells me, 'you are back to your old self' ( a sigh of relief), she says that last year I was different,... domesticated, like I was playing some role that you, unspoken or not, had willed me to play. And maybe I played it willingly, until I realized that this was not a game anymore. I cannot mother more than one of us, not yet being one myself, still in need of my own.
Run to your parents, she says.
If I did she would never forgive me. Because despite what she will say to me, when she has stopped trying to protect me from her mouth, she could not bear the thought of destroying her reputation in the eyes of those who still buy it. After all, it's all she has left.
You will see me vanishing soon. You will notice only when it lasts longer than all the other times I have left you before, in my head, not ready to follow with my feet.
