flash post: blood and water.

I hope the thought of me still draws blood. // What does that say about me?

They are twin thoughts, arriving at my doorstep in quick succession. The first twin, mischievous, revels a bit in the ruin. How funny, it marvels, Taylor Swift suddenly finding a way to be absolutely everywhere. My eyes scan the bar when we wander in and, for a second, twist in disappointment not to find you on some barstool. In the months immediately after our unraveling, what-if conversations played through my mind in a panic. I spent all that time getting ready, only to discover you’d stood me up.

The second twin sours the air and softens the heart. The truth is, I know my joy would buckle the moment I saw your sadness. It’s the very reason I had to claw free, start over, and let you fade into some old story. Heartbreak leaves behind war wounds, and we become like old people, swearing a snow is coming because our ankle acts up. I look in the mirror and confess I’m not cruel enough to win that kind of war, and then I wonder why I want to.

Does it make me a monster that I hope you’ve realized you lost something precious? When I think back to those days, I remember weathering your bruises for the small sake of keeping you company. I know that you know I saw you under the light, trembling. I made you safe in a way no one else ever has, and I hope it haunts you.

It’s a grotesque admission, perhaps, a monster wading out of the shadows. But what is more human, really? What feels more honest to this experience than wishing we could find a way to stay behind when we go?

Ours is a story collecting dust on some sun-soaked windowsill. Cracking its pages is an eerie reminder of the passage of days and the pileup of debris. To draw blood now would be to strike a person far removed from the man who left these marks. We are strangers whose past selves are trapped in amber in one another’s junk drawer.

When we broke, water flooded the room, and our lungs burned for air. The rooms have dried, those rotting floorboards ripped up and replaced, and that faucet goes untouched. Still, in the silence of a stray moment every thirtieth day, there falls a solitary drip. Funny the way the sound echoes throughout the house.