The Mattress Still Has Your Body On It And I'm Not Sure Why

The Kitchen Floor

When the marriage of the soul shallows itself into marriage of the body, it becomes ugly sex, full of hate and quick jittering in its violent wakefulness.

Making love isn't for people like us, we get to kill for each other and lie for each other and lean into each other so hard we bleed. That is what we get. We don't get hand holding or morning cuddles or bad movies, we get ugly frustrated grunts of hatred and love tied together with ropes of steel.

We make it ugly, because we were made for fucking, not for love. We are perverse, unable to look into each other's eyes while we shatter the heartbeats kept in our thin wrists and wretched necks. I have seen her bruises and the rats that climb her ribcage and gnaw her brain, but her eyes are forbidden, ones I cannot touch, I cannot hurt, the eyes are there and they will be, they will be.

Standing at the kitchen table, in the resounding quietness of drunken stupor and nimble, weak limbs. The tap runs too slow, the cup I run underneath it fills up too slowly. Vomit in the sink, bile in my veins. When she walks in the room, there is no light being lit, she is there and she is dull. Visions of scrawny bodies hitting the floor in depraved anger, pushed aside, hidden away.

"You're drunk again." I don't turn. I down the water, it's lukewarm and nearly sour, tasting of liquor and stale ink. There's drink seeping from my pores, pouring out of me. Thoughts of shrinking and drowning in a bottle of rum.

When it seems there's nothing left to do but stare at collarbones and bruised knees and run to the end of the world instead of looking in her eyes, I turn.

"And you're a useless junkie," I laugh, throwing my head back like an actor performing, taking a bow, hanging onto the counter and laughing lies, it's all lies.

Her and I are both weak, scrawny and thin, tall enough we could peek into the galaxy and feel worthless but short enough we can't quite reach God. There's stairs and cigarettes, partying and drugs, stains littered on our bodies, where the heroin goes in, and how it goes out too quickly.

She's pretty, I think this often, when my eyes linger on her back and her ankles, the want and the ache embrace each other and I feel so, so very far away even just mere inches apart from her. I need more, I need to be climbing in her ribcage and gnawing at her brain, I need, I want to be everything, everything all at once, twisted, depraved, disgusting.

I see her legs.
She only lets her legs bare in the summer when it's hot, she wears only a shirt that's too big for her, modesty doesn't matter anymore, not to people like us.
She's always cold, she never eats, she smokes cigarettes and does too many drugs, she'll cry about her dad and I'll tell her to stop and she'll smile, an empty, tired smile.
So tired. So tired I want to yell and bleed for her but so angry, because being tired is stupid because everyone is tired and everyone lives and we just have to figure out how everyone else does it.

In a one room apartment, we will live far apart.

And on the kitchen floor that night, we laughed and we corrupted ourselves further, and just for that night, we pretended we were in love. We didn't cuddle or kiss, but we loved in the way we knew it to be, rough and ugly and sweaty and gross and undesirable, but it was the way it was, and that was that.

When the hours passed and the love wore tired, we lay next to each other and mourned This often happened after we pretended; we went silent and spent a quiet, unspoken moment mourning, not quite sure of who or what. Maybe, mourning what could have been.
Then we both wished for death, on the cold floor of the kitchen, but when sleep clawed at the corners of our eyes and begged to be let in, we accepted it as the next best thing. It smelled of rum, and we dreamt of everything but each other.

As nights passed and days came bleeding through closed curtains, we refused to budge, we were sticky and smelly but we knew no one could understand so we skipped work and gambled with our savings, and we laughed at the thrill. The thrill of having so much more, or having nothing left at all. We watched each other bleed. The thrill of it all, it always ended when the drugs wore off and the love we felt so passionately left us like roadkill, run over, over and over again.

Days passed and when passion would strike, we would sneak around, stealing cigarettes from convenience stores and selling them for cheap.
We took advantage of days like this, days where we had burned through our stash and we would team up, almost as if we are something. Days when it wasn't too cold, so I didn't have to hear her complain about how she's cold and tired and wants to go home because she feels dizzy. I won't have to carry her home while she whines about her headache. I don't have to think about her falling down, far away, crashing into the ocean.

We aren't good, we never tried to be, being good isn't for people like us, we say it, over and over again,
It never was for people like us.