a break-up, broken down. |
Thirty four cigarettes, spilt on the floor by your cat, you yelled at him as you cleaned up the mess. Four hundred quiet late-night knocks on the door before backrubs on the floor, voices and kisses behind the coffee table, hidden from your sleeping roomate. Fifty-five minutes of songs played with closed eyes and you in the back of my mind, the sound drowning in the back of a crowded bar. Five hundred bowls of weed and a few dozen beers shared with you, fifteen years old, holding hands and finally feeling okay. Eighty-eight piano keys you never heard me play, but you said I must be pretty good, and you'd teach me to drive a manual car if I taught you Billy Joel. A thousand and three missed phone calls and cancelled plans and the weights lifted from my feet as I walked and listened to six new messages. Thirty seconds of emanated light from a kiss too spiritual and brilliant to be reflected in all the paintings from your meditation books. Fifteen minutes to your apartment and a four-song mix tape and silence enough to take inventory of our love, seventeen years old with a heavy hard-beating heart and two years of you and a few lies and lying silently asleep and two empty boxes of cigarettes, one awful secret, and one dying beautiful love that once was and might have really been. |