I’m renting out the room to breathe for a great price. Time. Strung along for months, longing for an ending. Or a beginning. Whichever comes first. Which is typically her. 

She’s choking. I’m smiling. It smells like sweat. It looks like nothing. The lights are off. I’m traveling through touch and taste. Lust is a faulty compass. It leads me to the same place. It leads me to the same mistakes. She softens up. I harden. 

Before she can moan, my hand greets her mouth. The walls of her throat close. Moisture arrives to her eyes. She’s thinking out loud yet not making a sound. She only hears my words, ‘stop me.’ She doesn’t. She never will. I’ll let her escape if she wants to. She’d rather suffocate.

March 24th, 2024

Her rosy cheeks aren’t for me. She’s probably just suffering from a sunburn. I tend to snuff the light out of the day before it begins, whereas she is stalked by it. The light follows her like the shadow it creates. Heat transfers to cold so I’d imagine she powers the sun. I need shades for both. Or we could lower the exposure on life.

Let life be an eternal sunset, a picture-perfect half hour that needs no filter – the happiest of hours. I pick up a half-off drink and I too lose my filter for the night. The dark lulls me into believing I can’t be seen. But I’m pale. Vampires stand out.

My clothes, the color of ash so if I smoke or spill no one can tell me otherwise, don’t cover my mind, spilling all over the place, no matter how dark it is. The sight of me is replaced with the sound. When one sense goes, another takes its place. When one door closes another one opens… it’s probably to a bar.

February 17th,, 2024

I thought my cat was an asshole. But like me, he’s just misunderstood. He pushed a vase off the counter at 3 a.m. and cockblocked me in my parents’ living room. The $10 roses spread out on the floor. As did my date. The anemic Colombian was no longer lying beside me. She was fetching her clothes in the dark while I was cutting myself on the broken glass.

It brought me back to the day we met. We were comfortably uncomfortable in the backseat of my first car. My glasses couldn’t handle the passion of our after-school hugs. They were torn in two. I never did see how bad she was for me. Though she never broke my heart. She broke a bunch of my shit. And my cat was aware, along with everyone in the house.

The lights flickered on in every room. I hurried her to my car and kissed her softly before slamming the door on her ass. She didn’t fight me, for once. That’s how I knew it was over. She didn’t break the silence. I promised myself that the next time I saw her, it would be in the daylight. That day never came. Neither did I.

February 6th, 2024

Boring texts. Chapped lips. Dirty clothes. Sex on sandpaper. Shitty pick-up lines. Unfiltered thoughts. Overdressed thots. The Titanic without a story. A really sad melon.

I take Dry January very seriously. Take my booze; I’ll take every bit of moisture Mother Earth has to offer. Foreplay? Gone. Girl? Gone. Sour and sweet? Gone. December? Still here. It’s the honorary 33rd. I’s not the end of the year—or my sobriety.

Why restart my problems? I’ve mastered them. I can tolerate a glass half empty; it hides the end. Sleep only reminds me I have to wake up again. I’d rather tirelessly travel through the next day and the next, as they flow into each other like a pair of ice melting into paradise—a place I’d happily drown.

January 31st, 2024

I don’t fall asleep as much as I get spartan kicked into my subconscious. There’s no feather gently gliding in the wind or sheep asking me to do math, there is just a fight, a battle, a slow-motion war with the back of my eyelids that only ends when I’ve drugged myself into a dreamless night.

CBD, Advil PM, Melatonin. They all try to advance the cause. But I need my drugs to be as hard as it is to get out of bed in the morning. Otherwise, the night rages on. The thoughts attack. Everything from what I ate to how I said hello traps me in a prison of the restless mind.

As I lay, staring down the whispers on the ceiling, I inhale. The clouds gently lift me off the bed. The sheep take shape. My eye lids become too heavy to lift. I exhale. A puff of smoke leaves my mouth, hi-fiving me on the way out. I’m sacrificing my dreams for a good night’s rest. The weed eases me into a dreamless night, but it turns the time awake into a nightmare.

January 27th, 2024