January bubbles up like my champagne glass: filled to the brim. I am tiptoeing downstairs, waiting for midnight to strike in another time zone. It's the beginning of the end.
The month comes full circle and so does the version of me who believes in good things, in good people, in good, and so does the version of you who believes in me, who believes me.
It's May and I'm still crying and by crying I mean staring at the sun on my patio with a drink in my hand every day, letting the vitamin D burn me from the inside out.
I can't watch another plane cross the sky without me, so I run away and hide my tears behind the mountains, hide my terror behind a half-baked future, hide the truth behind touch and kiss and pizza and wine and lies. so many lies.
Summer does what summer does. I wax and you wane, I heat and you cool, I come and you run. We are a grandfather clock chiming at three after the hour, timing an eternal bitch.
I snap the rubber band on my wrist to remind myself this should hurt. I should hurt. I am a burning star, that is to say, I am pretending this thing called shiny isn't already dead.
August drenches me in longing, coats me in the soot of wildfire smoke, the ashes of desire. Affection laps at the shore then leave me washed out with the tide and then I just go, I left first, it was me.
The fall looks in her mirror and sees me darkly a dead thing still holding onto dried out intentions. Trying and trying to cling to a future I had scratched into the wood stick figures beside a hidden cabin but it was never fleshed out. All skin and bones.
I am tired of adding logs to the fire, tired of carrying the kindling, tired of myself. The next two months wring me out like a dirty sponge, squeezing away every drop of grime and leaving my soul shrivelled. Life is cyclical, isn't it? always back on its bullshit.
I tempt fate to be near him again just to make sure the loss of you is still sharp. The bar bathroom finds my face as white as the ghost of the dress I didn't wear. I almost let it happen again and again.
I cut off my hair and they cut into my body and I learned, that I wasn't the only one lying. So I find small round saviours to inhibit the reuptake of the serotonin or sunshine or something (and I think it's helping).
Winter sits with me in the window while I watch you walk forward without me. I get it, I chose this, but the choice isn't always the same as I want, so I bite off the tip of my tongue where I still love to sit.
I am sitting in the consequences of broken promises and I end this how it started: champagne addled, too close to the things that broke me, too far from what I want.
I am throwing away the corner pieces of the puzzle and glueing together the ones that didn't fit because this is my life and I have to fit: a portrait of a girl holding onto what wasn't holding her.