I don’t not remember the self-inflicted nausea of my early twenties that I blamed on everyone but me.
Hardened sandbags strapped to my sides, fastened with T3 text messages that I sent 3 hours ago.
You never replied.
I didn’t not know I was too good for you. I was just too insecure to move.
Paused to feel the full confusion of your rejection between PBR cases and Jameson neats.
Between hangovers & ignored calls & seeing you next Saturday, I fell for your crooked teeth and perfect wit, draped with assured statements in tones that felt like a reclaimed wood table with perfectly placed knots in it or a broken Springsteen record, if you could touch sound with your fingers. If I could see what was really broken, or who...
I remember the first time you fucked me and came quicker than your phone fingers. You claimed you once knew how to make love and I claimed to love you as I inhaled cold air next to your warm cheek and felt whatever sweat was a lie. As you went limp inside me, I never knew how much you never made me feel good.
Walking a step ahead of you, I heard you laugh at me for feeling. I didn’t know how to feel sad for you.
The glitter of my organs when we’d make out in the door, the blurring of intentions and our mouths melting snow fall with the warmth.
I didn’t not know you’d leave me or force me to leave you first. But the way you cut it all from me left something so much worse.
Filling the doorway with blurred mouths and smoke, I didn’t know that love and hate were twins. In that doorway, again, I didn’t know that, sorry, how do you say “you fucked her and got her pregnant” in pretty prose with a bow? I don’t know.
I didn’t not know your lack. But I wish, how I wish I knew mine.