third time is the charm

Your mother called tonight. I couldn't care to drag myself out of bed. So I just rolled my naked body over and answered the phone. These calls always start out the same. She is bragging about some party, some man, or some place she went with her friends. They used to be my friends. But now it's just me in some room with a box full of dishes she was supposed to take last Christmas and a bed I bought to forget her. There are pictures and postcards for her in some drawer; I keep them there so I have an excuse to see her. But I never take them. And she never asks for them.

I didn't mean to laugh when we decided to kill you. If you read this then we didn't. Maybe we had a change of heart. Maybe we didn't have enough money. Maybe we sold you to the highest bidder.

I don't even know why I am telling you this. You don't exist. Or you do. But I don't care.

Because yesterday I walked out of work and it smelled like summer. It smelled like last year when I spent nights with either a beautiful artist, a soul sucking mother figure, or someone else. It was calm, still, warm, happy; the things I hadn't been until recently.

So I sucked in the smell and remembered how it felt to be in love, in awe, and in the grip of drugs.

And today it was sucked back out of me. Someone spun circles and crashed into a wall and as I drove by I saw the clouds of smoke leave their car.

And I knew I would die. And you would die. And me, and your mother, and those other women, and her friends, and my coworkers, and every other relationship I worked on for so long, they would all die too.