Finish Me Off (#hearteater)

This is the third drink.
Perhaps the fourth.
I’m not sure.

This is the twentieth cigarette
I’m grinding out with nervous fingers
in an overflowing ashtray.

This is the fifth time I’ve put on
and eaten off my lipstick,
blotting it in the mirror between times.

The thirty-eighth time
I’ve checked my phone for messages.
The seventeenth time I’ve thumbed
the volume on the ringer up to max,
even though it was there already.

You’re not coming.
And I know it.
I know it.

I knew it on drink number one.
When I teased the plastic off the pack of cigarettes.
As I stroked the message key on my phone for the first time.

You’re not coming.

Dignity oozes from the savage bite mark in my heart.
I’ve lost too much of it to muster up a sense of rejection
or disappointment or anger.
Those are emotions felt by the entitled.
I’m past that.
I feel nothing but the numbness
of your lingering venom.

I down the last drink,
smoke my last cigarette,
turn off my phone and lie down,
hoping that sleep will take me.

But it doesn’t come.
Instead I become the tracks on which
a freight train of memories winds its course
through the perilous mountains of time.

The journey always ends in the same place.
On that dizzying height.
There, where you smiled,
where your arm encircled my waist,
where you pulled me to you tight
and took that first dreadful bite.

That’s when I cry.
Always just there,
as if it were the sad part in a movie that loops.
The film music swells and then stutters,
swells then stutters, swells…

I get up,
light the twenty-first cigarette,
pour the fifth drink
and turn on my phone.

One night,
some night,
you’ll have to come
and finish me off.

Note: Please go and take a look at the wonderful work being written on the www.eaterofhearts.wordpress.com blog.