twelve 

A convict moon tonight. Stolen from me all that is anything worth being. Tonight. My better judgment. The sensations and manifestations of well-being. Emotions washed out with the tide. And his dark cloud minions…teasing me. Their taunting dance, to the rhythm of the solar systems seductive vibrations. Twisting and meshing into impish forms of the one thing that is the only thing. To me. I see her there, in the sky, distorted and yet still just as lovely as ever. Her smile a caricature. Her features cartoon. Her sex bulging with the threat of explosion. I stare and I drink and I want to cry but my body refuses to produce the necessary energy. I beg for rain. For release.

Inside my apartment, **** is the same. I haven’t lifted a finger to address any of the issues facing me there. Spills on the floor. Crumbs ground into the carpet. Nickels and pennies scattered about. Clothes and pillows and blankets and baseball hats and dishes. Good heavens I’m boring myself.

I just don’t have it in me anymore. To continue this charade. To continue to live day-to-day, minute-to-minute, constantly wondering and hoping and stumbling and continuously titling this bottle back until its vacant like me. I tell myself it was all a lie anyway. Her affection. Her attraction. My addiction. This 30 days of romantic yadda yadda and pathetic love torn heart bleeding sick kick me in the gut horror. I remind myself that I am better than this. Normally I am the one making someone else feel this way. But that’s no comfort because now I hate myself even more for ever having made anyone feel this way.

I turn on the tv and it blisters my retinas. Every channel, everyone, facsimiles of her beauty. Never quite as perfect. Yet as close as I will no doubt ever come again.

I turn on some music and every song is her singing sad melodies about us. Or happy ditties about an impossible future. Instrumental suicides. Each note joins the rhythm of the cosmos and penetrates deeper and deeper into all the diseased super strings of my failing form.

I stumble to the chair where she used to sit and I clutch the pillow to my face. Be damned, even her scent has left me.

I scour every inch of this prison searching for anything she may have left behind. Lotion. Deck of cards. Pen. Stray hair. But there is nothing. It’s as if she never existed at all.

And maybe she didn’t.

Perhaps in my solitude I conjured up a ghost of everything I ever imagined to be perfection in a woman. And I brought it to life with my loneliness. And I devoured it and I bled it and I turned it into another life altering heartache.

All an elaborate hoax. Her stunning eyes. Her soft, precious face. The curves of her hips. The swell of her breast as she inhaled deep to try and fight off the hiccups. The sweat on the back of her neck. The bend of her knee. The fragrance of her most intimate regions. The curl of her toes. The way her tiny fingers laced into mine and gripped as if I might ever try and get away.

No. I am good. But I’m not that good.

She is more real to me than that criminal, detestable, ball of rock we call the moon. And she is just as far away.