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My worst habit


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BadlyDrawnGrrl

We woke up that day in bed together. Dim sunlight splayed across the sheets...and we blinked and laughed. I don't think I'd even had a real conversation with you yet.

 

The upward drag of eyelids, your slow sleepy grin your tattoos in the hazy fog of morning. The memory of a first name. Recognition like a lighter flicking.

 

(I'll quietly unravel myself; you won't know it's happening. Even now, weeks later, I maintain the surface tension, the impression of stillness, of calm.)

 

As the horizon shifts outside the shadows here too shift; the curve of your naked spine, a vulnerable nameless creature, voiceless thing. How cleverly you camouflage this. How every sweet smile of yours puts even more miles between us.

 

I've got a confession. I traced your magnetic field in secret, that one time, in throat-closing sorrow. I followed those subdermal patterns, breathed in your ink and touched the north and south poles delicately, once each, with a fingertip.

 

That night you opened the door and I stood there in your hallway, red-faced and breathless from the cold. And that same chorus echoing catastrophically through me, an uneasy refrain: I knew it, I knew it...I knew it would be like this...

 

...Every time you stop on that streetcorner and kiss me goodbye I leave more of myself behind. And the empty space that remains fills up with salty, malnourished unrequition.

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