daisy chains

selfish (2)

I don't know when it was when he changed but suddenly his girl stopped coming around. he brought other people, sometimes boys, sometimes girls. i thought of their hands, and his hands. he didn't touch the boys like he did with the girls, he didn't laugh with the girls as he did with the boys. i thought of their lips and the stains on the coffee cups, washed away and down the drain and god knows where that takes the left over coffee, god knows if it takes it anywhere. sometimes i think things that i don't see simply disappear. i hear some people say the same, that we all live in a video game, pac men chasing dreams in boxes designed by others. we eat away at each others feelings only to fulfill our own voids. humans are selfish creatures, we're selfish for knowing it, we sell fish to forget it.

but he still talks to me regularly when we're alone, and it's just the two of us in this lonesome diner with its lonesome outdated music that I don't think anyone really has ever heard before. I've memorized every note of them now.

I wipe down the counter, and he writes numbers on boxed papers. I can't think of two people that are so unlike one another. Like the cliché tale of the sun and the moon but at least those two meet at half point. The moon tips its hat, "how do you do". The sun beams and then turns the other way. That's not the end of their story, we'll see them again tomorrow and they will do the same, and things will always be the same.

But I am neither the sun or the moon, and I can't think of anyone else I've wanted to be with. when he looks up from his books, he smiles and then he asks for a refill. when i look up he's got his eyes stuck on something else, and it burns a mark on my chest. the twisted fork melts its way though me, comes out the other side like a sick and dark anti-valentine version of cupid's arrow.

Some have noticed. Paul the guy at the back with that thing that flips the fries in their cut out boxes dipped in sizzling oil. He smiles at me and shuts the divider between the kitchen and the counter and I want to laugh and pull it back pleadingly, hold it down with the coarse curls that grow like tightropes from my head. "it's not what you think."

Not what you think at all because he switched that girl for a boy, and that boy for a girl who wants to be a boy, and they look so cute together. If only I could be him, her, they. I want to read the numbers on the pages, lock him up in my one bedroom apartment, and decipher them by myself as he watches me. He will not recognize me.