It admittedly didn’t take long to slip back into the familiarity of old habits.
A pocketful of hours into the 517 and I was back on a familiar rise. Where the lights from a mean city twinkle down on dirty water. Not the welcoming baptismal I anticipated. But it is the one I guess we deserved.
Because we both lied. I realize that. It was just in different ways. And to very different people.
Some lies were so big, the charm of their gravity pulled me from the dirty alleyways of Wayne’s City. All the way up to nowhere fucking Michigan. And when that attraction broke, I spun out inside the barreled sprawl of a strange Capital City.
Running feral, I could only capitalize on the crime of unsupervised hours. Existing solely inside starving measurements of pour me. Living inside the heartbeats of muddled shotglass time. And unhealthy decisions. Because other poisons lingered inside, long after the healing of that first bite itched.
So I needed a stronger toxicant to kill the underlying wrongs.
That deterioration in turn fed the lies I told myself. The ones I spoonfed a greying face every night. Kissing green glass monsters. Relishing in the burn of their refreshing sin. Dancing with the skeletons under that broken bed. Until the inevitable regurgitations made any attempt at gentle sleep just another impossibility.
I knew back when they were happening that gentle mistakes were being made. Harsh lessons were being learned—I still bear the marks of those unintentional infractions. And carry the weight of having lost far too fucking many battles of the hypothetical. Because mine is a mind attracted to the linear. And others delighted in fights of invented fancy.
But there are always different sides of a story when people come at you with two faces. That clever deception which makes it impossible to know what to believe. Or where to run.
Two sides of a page; two sides of a coin. Like the one originally flipped to determine our fate. And the eventual renting of that skyline hotel room that cemented me here. But ultimately, a coin buried beside the stiffening body of a furry friend. Because it was the only fitting offering I had left to give.
Even in the soundtrack of our lives, there was conflict. Her version; his version. The softer one might have been found first. But mine screams it out the best.
Three states. Two hearts. One outcome—I never really was good at math. This pickled brain was always more tightly wired to the symphony of language. But like the literary dirtbag I was born to be, I broke all those rules, too. Just because I could. And because it was more fun making the learned eyes of rigid editors twitch in Chicago styled revisions.
So I continue on with this undomesticated existence. Living from one dirty round to the next. Measuring time in the rhythm of temperamental tin monsters. Going where I want. Smoking what I want. Fucking what I want.
And yet, all I ever wanted was to be wanted.
But here, in the shameful twilight of these illegitimate aspirations, I realize just a little too late that is probably never going to happen.
And that is okay.
The 🦊 runs free, forever chasing his tail words…
