Read an excerpt from smdanler’s “Stray:” “In the morning I wake up and sit in front of the mirror we f*cked in front of eight hours earlier. It comes as no surprise that I see the Monster in the reflection. It was always me”
We can walk to the Chateau.
We stayed at the Chateau early in the affair, when I was still living in New York. I flew in. I told none of my West Coast friends, or my aunt, that I was coming. Drifting into the city of my birth anonymously elated me and if I’m honest, that’s when it started, the splinter of a thought: I could live here again.
We are still waiting. We are junkies who can’t increase our dose. Every meeting we’re trying to reclaim that brief minute we believed love weighed more than timing, geography, or the limits of each other’s character. The same sharp intervals of time, the same inane text messaging, the same replaying and rewriting what we’ve done, regurgitating excuses for how much pain we’ve caused, then, the same someday, soon maybe.
Touching the nape of my neck, the ridges of my ears, which he notices have perforated edges, Can you believe it? I don’t care, anymore, about the flight he took. The hints, promise-like, but loose enough to slip out of. The false flags of progress he plants as we loop through Fryman Canyon, saccharine light on cattails, another fucking sunset. We sit for a bit on a rock and he is calm, he has everything under control, while I am far away, voiceless, small, but protected from him. This is it, I keep thinking. He carries me part of the way on his back, sweat slicking the front of me. I lick it off his neck.
I have the urge to tell him that it is real this time. That barging into Los Angeles with gifts and flowers to “celebrate” my birthday and then making me sleep alone is—really, honestly, truly—the death blow to us. But I say nothing about that. He wonders at the fact that I have no curtains.He doesn’t. I sleep like I have a fever, my skin at first itching, then too raw for the sheets. My earlobes are hot and swollen, I can’t bear my head on the pillow.
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