Peroxide (Peterick)

no ragrets

There's a demon in my stomach that won't get out, and his motive is to infiltrate my mind as well. He materializes in the static blinds of the window, spectral from a dichotomy that should have never transpired for the foreshadowing of what is to come, and his chant hollows out the eaves of my heart with a necrotic rigor, so I've become unsusceptible.

Blackness stills the room and stashes paranoia where it should never go — in the lacustrine valleys of my lungs, where water massacres any trace of oxygen for its own harrowing grace — so all I can do is accept my fate.

A box inaugurates the inveiglement of my interest, and as I approach, I realize that it's nothing significant, that it can just be pelted at the floor without consequences, so my fingers balter around it and exile the object to the ground.

The fragrance it fashions is a svelte pirouette within the walls, if only to my ears, but to other people it's a war cry, and they'll soon be armored for battle.

Without a prior alert, the door tiptoes forward, and the rarely meek form of Dallon slides past. "I heard a noise," he explains, frame still trussed in the threshold.

"You couldn't have," I reject blankly.

"Is that because the door is locked, or is it because you don't think anyone cares enough to help you?"

"Try and find out." My brows would usually be baked in sarcasm on any other occasion, but the only thing into which they're baked is asphalt, so my friend takes up the duty.

Dallon's mouth is crucified in a smirk, dots of rose clinquant in nails and binding. "I know you well enough — I don't have to."

"It's been two years," I counter. "A lot can change."

A sneer razes Dallon's lips, and a quip is soon dribbled after "Yet you're still the same stuttering clown."

"I thought you were here to help." A cold stare deters the man, and his goals shift abruptly.

"Right." Discretion epitaphs my attacker's face, and his attention stems from another area, rather than my unfortunate speech patterns. "Why are you crying?"

"The money question," I chuckle impassively. "I'm always crying these days."

Dallon seems genuinely confused. "The old Patrick didn't do that."

"The old Patrick is gone." The martyr of a warning flitches my tone, pounding its feet into the wood scraps with an implacable determination. "A lot can change in two years," I repeat.

And it's true, even if Dallon won't agree to it, because many changes have held on tightly throughout these dreary months, and denying it is making a fool out of yourself. For example, Dallon wears gloves now. I wash my arm in hydrogen peroxide as a compulsion and shudder at the thought of the past. Dallon hasn't even said my name until now, and it all contributes to the notion that we are not the same as before, not in the slightest, and though I've experienced enough stress sprouting from these affairs, I can't help but wonder if we're even the same corporeal people at all, if that's even a guillotine for nostalgia.

But we have to be the same people, at least in a biological perspective that dictates the concept that seven years create a new identity for someone, and from that ideology, some part of me has staggered in the aroma of Dallon's house, and my memory of it is still partial.

In seven years, I will be someone who has never touched Dallon Weekes, and that phrase kept me going in the time after our relationship was decapitated, and now that he's back, the count has started again, but seven is irrational when we've already been altered so much in two years, so our lives will have changed with the same precision as seven, and at least in mind, I will be whole, and my body will have to follow five years later.