saint valentine.
there are about a thousand sharks swimming inside my head right now. i keep feeding them, giving them bait in the form of blackouts and things we did when the lights were out. we were different people then. we were strangers by day, but when we lay ourselves down to sleep at night, it was like our bodies were waters that each had charted infinitely. i knew what it meant when her body got hot to the touch. i knew what it meant when her body tensed. i knew what it meant when she looked at me like that. i knew what it meant when the only time we exchanged an i-love-you was when the covers were pulled.
i remember the last thing she said to me. she said, “goodnight, dana.” when i woke up, she was gone. my chest weighed a ton. as soon as i opened my eyes and saw she wasn’t sleeping, i knew what had happened. i lied there for three days just staring at the crown on her pillow. i couldn’t bring myself to move or answer the phone or feed the cat. i should have been happy. i should have been a lot of things. but i wasn’t. my insides turned like rusty cogs with a wrench stuck in the works. my brain only worked in reverse. everything was stuck on repeat. i wanted to say terrible, awful things that no one should ever hear, but i didn’t want to be me any more. i didn’t want anyone to know that i had ever existed in such a state. i wanted to take some pills or something, anything, i didn’t care, that would just, i don’t know, erase the last six years of my life. i wanted to flip my mattress to the other side and pretend like i was the only one who’d ever slept in it. i wanted to act like i used two toothbrushes because my bottom teeth were more sensitive than my top. i wanted time to stop so that i could just figure out how the hell i could make it like i had never even loved before.
but.
i realized it takes a lot of remembering to erase what you knew to be absolutely, positively true.
and that wasn’t something i was strong enough to do.
so.
i lied there in that bed with red sheets
until
my muscles and bones and tissues and cartilige and everything i was possibly made of forgot how to function.
i thought that if i could get my body to start over, then i could starve these fucking sharks to death.
