Angerine

through a maelstrom of rain and tears, between fuzzy hills patch-worked in the blundering light of the Central Coast sun. I can't see the road 20 feet ahead or behind me; in an orb of storm and discontent. I think of him and how he acted when his dad died--he would care less about me.

I remember the touch like a knife in the back and hydroplane around a corner. A quiet bar and a sweet margarita, replayed twice like a broken record player doused in lemon water, shivering within waxy cups.

I bite the lip and taste the plastic lies that cling to his teeth. A voice in the back of my mind tells me I shouldn't, but for a moment, I believe that this is his passion manifested and that nobody would be so vulnerable unless they wanted something.

Everytime I get close to forgetting you, my freedom a wave of hot air that I can brush with my fingertips, you lasso me back and gut my heart.

Shattered over the picture you posted with her last night on the eve of your birthday. She changed your plans and materialized my worst fears about why you dropped me. She’s too pretty for you, this fellow gypsy girl, out of your league, just like I was, but it hollows me anyway to see you with her. She only existed in my paranoia until now.

My thoughts are on a see-saw. I soar up, rocket-power under my feet. A shivering ascent into the sky. A moment pause, just enough to feel my blood levitate in my veins.

And then I plummet back to earth, shattered knee caps as I try to catch myself. I sit, broken and bruised and reminding myself of the war you've waged on the very sinews and valves of my beating heart.

You always find away, a simple reach across the dark. It brings power to my splintered legs. And suddenly I'm weightless yet again, a sparrow on a morning gale, and I'm coming to reach back to you.

But your walls are up; they always were. You disclosed this from the start but I didn't heed the warning, only to be close to you.

I will only ever spill coffee on my white clothes.

With you near, I could write poems that reached the stars, blazing words born from my intoxicated bloodstream, burning through my aching skin.

You were sunlit oxygen in my saccharine veins. You were the moon that humbly bowed beneath the mountain peaks so that I could see the stilted light of the stars.

With you far, you're the dimmest star trapped in the black web night, a dying orb of cosmic gases. My pen falls short for you.

You are the inky nothing of my eyelids, shut tight when you kissed me for the first time under the stars. You are the hazy red of my ceiling, filtered by watering eyes as you brought me to a breach of pleasure, indistinct and faint compared to the coil of my body. You are the flaked, charred coals of the bonfire after they smothered it in saltwater and beer.

I saw his license plate last night. 10:26pm coming home. I imagined the taste of her lips. I was golden until I was inconvenient.

To the girl who robbed me. I hope you like my boy from Tennessee. I hope you like his cooking and his tattoos. I hope you like his laugh. I hope you like his small prick in the back of your throat and his sex whimpers. I hope you like the next girl he’ll use like he used us.

Here’s the truth: I miss him. I miss his passion behind his guitar, the same rhythm he brought into my bed. I miss the curl of his lip, the heat under his skin, his Knoxville lilt. I miss the way he called me “baby” as he got me to come. I miss tracing my fingers along the nest of inky musical notes on his spine. I miss his sinewy muscles in his freckled shoulders and the way he looked in my bed. I miss his reassuring words, poetic and gritty. I miss his world.

I roll facedown. I don't know which, but either choked laughter or delirious sobs rattle loose from my throat and into the down of the pillow.

Sobs because he tried to kill me. Laughter because he also vacuumed up my socks.

I remember his face as he pushed the pillow through my willowy arms over my mouth. Determined. Deathly. My shouts meant nothing to anyone else in the house. Alcohol flooded our veins. We were playing a game. Rough housing because I’m one of the boys.

Cool girl Angie can hang. Cool girl Angie who drinks as much beer as them and takes shots of Jack. Cool girl Angie who they kiss when drunk. Cool girl Angie who finds a hand between her thighs when she wakes up from a nap and doesn’t throw a slap. Cool girl Angie who gets smothered.

I tried to run. His arms grabbed me from behind and I was flying through the air. It was cinematic. A thriller. My knee clipped a chair, radiated pain, my back hit the bed and knocked the wind out of me. Too intoxicated and too weak. I couldn’t breathe. He had the pillow over my whole face. I couldn’t even turn my head.

Time to go backwards.

The morning had hurt. I winced at the taste of stale booze trapped in the lining of my cheeks. I sat up, dazed and dizzy and needing fluids. A lingering thread of shame and disgust threatened to disturb the drunken gloss my mind had veiled over the night.

Emma was in the kitchen, slowly easing the mesh through the coffee press. I watched as the water faded to black and the psychological buzz of my addiction rattled through my veins. She asked me what was wrong.

It was clear. The smudged mascara under my lids. The limping way I walked to avoid the peculiar shooting pains that radiated through my hips and stomach. The look in my eyes as I tried denying the night in my mind.

My words opened the floodgates that trapped reality. Suddenly, the truth poured out of me, onto the kitchen linoleum and stained the bright morning. My feet soaked up my own voice like dehydrated roots and I processed my own words slowly.

There are coffee mugs with varying degrees of dried lines of black grinds. Rings, like trees, spiraling up the ceramic sides display the patterns of mornings past.

One on my bookshelf from an early word binge, it has a logo of an old company I once worked for. A chalky brown ring near the top reveals the obsession with the literature and a cold cup of easily-forgotten creamed coffee.

There are two on my desk from clearing out emails and writing deep into an reflective night, black rings heavy as disease on their pale interiors. I drank the thick, viscous lifeblood quickly and with multiple refills from the coffee press tucked behind my laptop.

I know which burners on your stove don't get hot enough to boil water. I know what drugs you sold to pay for your first tattoo. I know what you look like with morning light cast across your sleeping face. I know that you still dream of her and it brings tears to your tortured eyes.