Chainsmoking Your Love

Can't be good for my sanity-

*tw for violence and gore in this chap folks*

It's a lazy Sunday morning. The city slogs to a slower pace, yawning from the heavy night before. Stumbling awake with blurred eyes.

For him, business never sleeps. He doesn't have the luxury of weekends or days off.

You're outside a neat little hipster café with your friends. Clustered with two of them on painted iron chairs, the colour of robins eggs. Slanted unevenly on the sidewalk.

Oat milk latte frothy in the cream bowl of your coffee cup, fluffy pancakes doused in syrup and pieces of juicy fruit. Enjoying one of the first mellow days of spring.

Buttery sunshine. Buds snapping open on tree branches and delicate things blossom into life again. Magnolias flowers sprout on trees like pink teacups. Wet green grass in the air as the sun warms it. No longer dulled by the razor sharp winter.

He catches a  glimpse of you enjoying yourself.

Your friend smokes a slim roll up. Tells a crass joke. He sees how you laugh. Foam on your top lip and pink flash of tongue as you lick it away. The air feels pleasant again.

You're hungover from too much alcohol last night. Cheap red wine that tasted like strawberries. Sprawled across your lumpy couch with it. Now you're paying the price, slight headache and puffy under your eyes. Bare naked beauty. Cause like hell were you bothering to put on makeup today.

You dragged on rumpled indigo jeans and a leather jacket with an oatmeal coloured sweater. Mulberry-black nail polish is chipped on your fingernails. You bundled your hair back into something gathered and messy. Laced up your cheap battered boots for the walk to brunch.

It's an all new overpriced spot, vegetarian and trendy. One friend has Avocado on sourdough toast and crumbled organic feta, drinking a mimosa in a champagne flute with an orange peel twirled in it. Your other friend orders something with scrambled eggs on the side, and a thick sludgy kale-green drink.

The thought of it makes him heave.

There's a florist next to the café. All those vibrant snipped stalks crammed into metal buckets outside the window, huddled on the sidewalk near you.

Hyacinth, sweet pea, and peonies. Perfumery of petals gusts along the street. Hiding the grit of city dirt that gushes from manholes and the tamped trash, that floats in the puddles and running down gutters from the recent rainfall. For a moment it's like you can believe this city is pretty.

It was no task to find you quickly, you weren't hard to get sight of. No one ever is. They never know he's coming for them and that's what makes it so easy.

He has you in his sights and has already gotten a feel of your patterns. Your rhythms and routines.

He had this notion people are like clockwork to study. All mechanics and cogs and bits and pieces. Seamlessly joined together to form a brilliant working piece. He has an affinity for what makes people tick. The crunch and spiral wind of their gears. The parts he can unlock and pick out to render useless.

He'll start simply with what he's learned of you; You don't live a grand kind of life.

You're just, unfortunately, someone who saw something you weren't supposed to and now you've been assigned him as penance.

You're a quiet member of the normal crowd, yet another face lost in the crushing folds of rat race society. Working a 9-5 to pay the bills day in and day out. You're tired. Dress in drab work wear. You go to work, follow your grumpy bosses barked demands, go home and bitch about him on your group chat.