the space above my ears.

December

I left the city in pursuit of innocence.

Thought maybe if I drove fast enough, I could leave my guilt at the bus stop in a cloud of exhaust.

Now, I am here.

The room is hazy, swirling with tendrils of fog.

A color I've never seen before bounces off the particles of moisture in the air.

I can feel the sticky body heat and the bass pumping in my chest, but the apartment is still and empty.

It is too much.

I approach the table

I flip the record to its third side.

The needle cries in anguish as it brushes against the uneven ridges, once, twice.

I turn the switch.

I listen.

My lungs sink slowly to the bottom of my body.

Disappointed but not surprised, I learn the bluebirds were not singing the songs we thought they were.

I can recite the whole plot-line now.

The crackling croon drifting from the speakers in our direction was the final omen.

We never saw it coming.

Our two fingerprints are the only ones in the world that are the same.

What does that mean for the carriage drivers?

Nothing, I suppose.
They can regress into the wool sweaters, hot oatmeal on nightstands, the deprived hands on the Statue of Liberty.

They will not know that their washboards are built from spines.

They will be unaware that their ankles are fused together.

They won't remember the graffiti on the inside of your throat like I do.

When will I learn to be alone?

When will we all learn?

There was that one time, years and years ago when we could walk on our hands through the volleyball beach and now we converge only in the loneliest of places.

All melted down into an acidic cesspool of feigned indifference.

I don't know, maybe I thought there would be more.

Maybe a part of me yearned for those tearful confessions seconds before eternal damnation, or maybe a kiss on the edge of a cliff.

Something dramatic.

Maybe just the right amount of cliche.

Suicide by passion.

I turned my pockets inside out, gave you all the nickels and gum wrappers I had.

You gave me a concussion.

I still feel like I owe you.

I'm sorry, baby, please, I didn't mean it that time.

I was just startled by the moths in the wall.

They seemed so alien in a house like ours.

That's what I said to you, and I meant it, meant for you to know I meant it.

But of course, I found out that the house was made of moths all along, and some part of me far away snapped.

The Wiseman I met in the park told me the twitching doorknobs and chattering ceilings weren't just my imagination and I have come to find he was almost right.

Every time I think I have purged my mind, my hands make another version of you.

I think they do it out of paranoia that I will forget.

They disagree with my head on nothing but you.