good riddance // meant no harm // i'm here // afterlife // quake // wrong
good riddance
it is the fifth time this week he's stumbled home, the wrinkled cotton of his overpriced shirts carrying the stench of booze in darkened corners, low lit bars, and flirtatious partygoers sporting the blood-red lipstick marking his neck. (the lipstick is a new development, although the rest is a twisted show of his newfound consistency.)
it is the third time this week the first ten minutes of his late night arrival irrevocably evolves into a shouting match between the two of you, your sleep-roughened voice rising with impatience as he slurs careless excuses.
you tell him go to hell at least four times a week, but it is the first time this week that he heeds your words, shaking off your presence like rainwater before slamming the door behind him.
good riddance, you think to yourself, the first time this week. (it is not, however, the first time your thoughts turn hateful as your eyes sting with some unshed emotion - and when he returns the next night, it will not be the last.)
meant no harm
remnants of caustic liquor eke out their last lingering moments on his breath, and you're sure that if you close the few inches between your bodies and press your mouth to his, the vodka would burn against your lips. (but you don't.)
why do you drink so damn much, you'll ask him over the pounding mental bruise of a hangover he'll inevitably wake up with, long limbs sprawled out against the sofa he's more familiar with than his own bed most nights. he'll shrug, as always, a sinuous rolling of broad shoulders shifting, rising and falling underneath the slide of his paint-stained shirt. he always ends up saying something like it's not like it matters, and seeing your face will soften it to a i didn't mean any harm in it.
but he does and you know it; you both know that he wouldn't drink until he couldn't even see straight or even get up on his own feet every night if he wasn't, to a degree, fatalistic; suicidal, even.
you want to say but you did, though, didn't you? but you swallow the words down, and they weigh down in the pit of your stomach, black and hollow and small because you want to say something but stop doing this to yourself sounds too much like when you hurt i hurt and i love you -
so you do nothing, say nothing; he meant no harm, his hangover will fade (and with any luck, so will the knot of feelings that threaten to overwhelm you whenever you look at him).
i'm here
estelle delgado has many tells. the left corner of her mouth curls up just a fraction when she tells a lie, and she combs her long hair through her fingers when she's agitated.
she says, "i'm fine," but the slight hitch in the curve of her mouth and the chiaroscuro of pale slim writer's fingers disappearing through ebony locks tells you otherwise.
her forest's eyes hint at unshed tears and a burden to rival atlas's; fine-boned hands trembling with the words her mouth will not betray. i'm fine, she says, and all you can say; all you can do is reply i'm here.
afterlife
life after death is a concept that you, high priestess of late night essay corrections and pitch black coffee, have no time to foolishly ponder.
he is dead but you are the one in hell - because afterlife; oblivion; nothingness was impossibly easy, but even breathing without him is a torment worse than the bloody end that found the one you love.
(loved.)
quake
the press of her lips, warm and soft and sure, freezes you in your place like a glance into medusa's stone eyes for a moment - and when the moment is over, when she has run out of the room and the silence rings in your ears so loud that you're almost certain that she was never there in the first place (save for the ghost of the jasmine perfume that rings her wrists and neck and the echo of the slamming door in your ears.)
it's only when you blindly reach for the nearest bottle of booze that you realize you are shaking so hard you fear you may come to pieces.
(the alcohol burns against your raw senses as your taut nerves quake with the memory of dark hair and bright eyes and fine-boned fingers running through your hair and - )
(you finish the bottle, dizzy in more way than one, wondering if you've just picked up another addiction, and you wonder again if she'll make or unmake you.) (you don't mind much either way.)
wrong
estelle delgado can logic her way out of any scenario, and estelle delgado is rarely, if ever wrong.
tell him, she says to herself, tell him, because he'll never know if she never tells him, if the words she'd been sheltering in the hollow of her psyche like some pearl are neglected and left to hesitant moments of silence and picked apart by time and memory and the wind -
and she's blurting it out and the look on his face is as though his world has fallen apart, and the jagged numb sinking feeling in her chest tells her that her world is falling apart, one pearl shard at a time.
tell him, she had convinced herself, confident and idealistic in the way only a girl in love could be. tell him, because it'll be okay and she is never wrong. (until she is.)