I want to stop you from ever making the horrible
mistake you made that night by the river with the empty whiskey bottle and fire
ant stung lips. The one where you crashed your bodies together, cramming the
parts like puzzle pieces that wouldn’t fit, like trying to tie knots in a
string that is too short and too thin to trust the pushing and the pulling of
your sweaty feverish fingertips.
You were like a five course meal and he was the
crumbs left on the floor after a dinner party and that was new and dirty, and
gritty, and it excited you so you pushed and pulled and pushed and pulled till
you had both grew stings of your own, and handed me the other ends so I could
watch you move. I would take your right arm and wrap it around the small of his
back and call it comfort and I would lean him into you for forehead kisses and deem
it all love but it was not love
It was the waxy cover of summer and it was the flu
of the alcohol and it was maybe even the empty flow of neon lights and the thin
carbon copies and forms that came after the blood on the sheets and the ugly
shapes your belly made as it deflated. It may seem like it, but it was not
love. Not yet.