"Darling, turn off the light and come to bed," she screams into my bad ear, as I place this holy book on the night stand. Victims shed tragedy like dead skin.
This ultraviolent wound breathes faded misery in the shapes of a thousand kisses, placed in accordance to their overall importance. I have spent a million nights waiting for her fever.
"Sweetheart, I'm going to the study," I tell her as I make my way to the room with no doors and even fewer windows. I speak just loud enough to blind her, content in the notion that she will sleep better if I'm dreaming.
This fit feels fully realized. Sadly, I am bent ecstatic on the numbing prospect of undying devotion to detail. Pills sometimes feel like an attention span with a timer.
She chokes on "I hate you", and I shut the door with a novelty shudder. She drifts off appropriately, on the verge of context, umpteen strokes away from crashing. She bleeds approval the same horrible way we breed complexity. Too many hours to count without a safety net. She is convincingly unaware of my presence. Her ignorance of this depression is severely authentic and rather intense.
My stomach muscles discuss Rotini and Shakespeare and God-knows-what-else-and-then-some. The way to a man's heart is through his spine, built vulnerable on the edge of collapse, but that's neither here nor anywhere. With each new addiction we remain forever and limited.
I can still smell her on my palm and I think to myself, This must be what Heaven smells like. Or, if I'm lucky, Hell. I tried so hard to complete her and ended up breaking her into pretty shards of sand. It's probably true, or at least secure to say, that I am what's strange about her coma, but I'll try not to dwell on it. I just wanted to hear her smile.
I sit alone, waiting for the sun to call my bluff. I shatter my ribs for the sake of invention, and I wear my poker mask with utter pride. Anything to validate this mood. Anything to cover up the scars. I'd give up my soul to prove my affection, but she keeps it in a box by the closet. It remains perpetually intact.
I sit here, waiting for something to happen, watching her sleep, and stir, and reach for me. I break a smile and turn off the lights. She sits up and draws me in with eyes like heroin, soft broken fragments of the moment we misplaced. I approach her without caution. Her fingers find shifting comfort in my skin; my fingers ride the waves of her hair. If only life was made up of endless nights.
I have given proper credit to her invitation, and with one word, whispered from her swollen throat into the hollow air of darkness - "now" - we become one. We remain complete until the somber ink drains from the clouds that shield the ceiling.
And when I wake up screaming, she says, "I love you."
