Butterfly heart

The skeletal trees stretch to vacant skies, a pale gray. Cracks and crevices divide the asphalt streets that stretch to what seems to be forever like rays, always searching but never finding anything. And those cracks are only cracks now but they will grow into faults. I am the rock that slips down the mountainside when someone steps on top of me. All I needed was a gentle push to go over the edge.

I thought that it would last forever, my days spent like coins. Spent anticipating and anticipating, always waiting for the future but I realized that I wasn't participating.

I didn't anticipate this.

Days wasted, and now my mouth tastes like copper. I will beg for them back, making calls on the landline phone that are never returned, just like the days that are never refunded. I remember when he used to tell me that now is a single thread and I never understood what he meant. But now, I know the future will never come.

I try to get through my head that nothing lasts forever, even though I wanted to preserve it in ice, but that ice melted and . Like the days and like the seasons I'll never last. I say I'm like a lot because I don't like much about me. I always use like or as because I am a simile, not a metaphor, and I will never be anything. I'll never be.

What I did for him, I can't do again. I'm done waiting for something to come or to last because I can only donate so much blood to him before it all spills out. These words that I dedicate to him only feeds the hunger.

My blood is my ink and the ink of all the ballpoint pens I own are my blood, but that doesn't matter because they dry up just the same. I can only rip off so many layers of skin before it becomes flesh and I can only tear so many layers of flesh off before it becomes bone and my bones can only-- Break so many times, before I amount to nothing.

I go through the photo album that we made, flipping through all the pages, leaving the door wide open. I can smell the smoke from my mother's cigarettes from downstairs. I can smell the anxiety she exhales for different reasons than me. When I leave the door open, it's like I've unzipped my skin like it is a jacket, chest open for everyone to see.

I keep the doors and windows shut because I feel like my soul is escaping from the room, even if by the cracks. In liquid form, I drip down the stairs, all the way to the bottom. I become a puddle on the kitchen floor; I need to be mopped up so that my being is whole again.

I can already feel the regret before I've even done anything. I take a cigarette from its pack that's hidden in the back of a cupboard, the last one, along with the lighter on the counter and go back upstairs. I know my mother has gone back to work now so I know she won't smoke another cigarette because she's worried about me. I can feel the flutter-stop in my chest as I walk up the stairs. I can feel the heart palpitations. All of my life is built in patterns that I've memorized and figured out yet I can't figure out the tempo of my heartbeat.

I close the door behind me so that I'm hidden from the world and I close the cracked window so none of my essence can escape. I light the cigarette and inhale a single breath so that maybe my paper bag lungs, filled with apprehension, will start to tear. I hope like my mom does that the pain will start to heal me but no amount of tar will fully coat over the scars in my lungs.

Or even better, fill them with the brim with it so that they are like cheap stress balls. The ones that always tear open because they were filled with sand in the first place. The smoke is not enough to feed my body so that tiny glass fragments start to form. I guess I don't intend to heal if I'm putting glass in my lungs that will form to break. When I walk it rattles in my chest; when I walk, the unease rattles in my chest.

I take the pictures out of their sleeves and place them on my bed. With the end of a cigarette, I burn his face and I feel better knowing I can say he isn't in the picture anymore. I start to regret and it builds in my throat but I swallow it back down. When I burned his body I burned the edges of mine too. I caught my mother once, looking at her old photos with her old partner, remembering their old times, and I know she wouldn't do the same.

I guess we both got screwed over. 

The cocoon of where my butterfly heart came out of still dangles from one of my ribs, tapping against the inner wall of my chest. And it is the jar that my heart is kept in and my throat is the holes made in the coffee filter so it can breathe. I know it too well; it will still try to flutter and fly away only to drop dead in my stomach. 

The photo album is empty of all the pictures that once filled it; I can remember a time when wear and tear didn't erode its edges. I feel okay for now. "For now", because I know my butterfly heart will start to pulsate again. I open the window to let the smoke out. I let my thoughts pollute the air so that I don't have to breathe them anymore. I exhale and let the anxiety leave my body. I open the door. I put the lighter down on the bedside table. I crush what I hope to be the last cigarette in-between my fingers.

And even though I say he is out of my life, I still see him at the gas station sometimes.