It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.

Jean Paul Sartre, The Flies

Life between fingers, sound beneath flesh: warm hands, searching tongues, memories slipping with grief. The clenching jaw, the scream, the loss that howls, then flickers, like a glimpse of your wrist on the knife. Empty concrete buildings grind their bared and broken teeth: abandoned, unbidden, recalled. Unforgotten insubstantial moments, forgotten once-substantial people: we were the ones who almost got out. Broke and unyielding, but shattered quite completely, we met beneath fading streetlights in evening’s grim embrace. We salvaged stale liquor and confession. You were always quickest to leave. 

We chased our last chances to an old Motel 6, to watch sullen men and the girls they were with. Frayed fishnet stockings and skin, skin, skin; torn by the night air, shivering thin.

We glanced, unaffected, from our windowsill-altar, altered the night with graffiti-stained souls: making love in strange places, or on shadowy floors– waking just sometimes, to the waxing of the moon. Damp sheets clung to the outline of us, cold knuckles twisting through my muttering spine. Fingers colliding with notches of bone, these jaws to your throat: adoration unfaded. 

An ashen grey gradient grapples with sky, smoke tumbles from your mouth, pale and bone-dry. Your eyes are wide—you’re still mine.

This is my vision of not getting out. I walk across the railway tracks, asphalt underfoot, my family and denim jacket fraying at their seams. The conflict and chaos and televised wars–how could I have left this unchanging place? Crunching gravel, broken windows, jagged-edge shards of empty bottles in the streets: unfinished promises beckon me home. I pause in the entrance, I linger on the last step. For just an instant, I catch my breath. I close my eyes. I remember what remains of my half-fictive past.

I am the last thing this history knows: a shadow in the doorway–it opens, I close.