February

Hospital beds with seizure pads and endless tears, crying because I’m weak, weak, weak and everyone keeps telling me to take the magic pill, just take it and everything will be wonderful, beautiful, perfect and my tears keep flowing and I keep shaking my head, no, no, no and no one’s listening.

What do I have to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it. What do I have to do to call you mine?

I smile and shrug it off, shrug him off. His words drip down my spine, falling towards the ground and I let them slide off of my body.

He’s not serious. He can’t possibly be. I request the one thing I know will be turned down: alcohol.

(… but he doesn’t. He lets me list off endless requests that will never be fulfilled. Like a child with three wishes, I take advantage of pretending at one point, all might come true. Ridiculous things I’ve never even asked for, would never ask for.)

You want me to stop drinking? Say it and this will be my last night.

In my mind, my mouth’s wide open, gaping. I have vague recollections of all those boys I claimed I would stop drinking for, those nights I promised never again and the next I was tripping in the middle of the streets, spending hours waiting in my car, writing in journals, wishing the spinning to stop.

Drunken slurs and stumbling in the foggy night, clinging on to me so that there’s no falling down, down, down.

Falling down, down, down and the only thing that’s keeping me from asking about the white powder is the little white chip in my hand that I grasp for desperately, afraid to lose what little I have left.