Free Write

I'm choking on the pine trees. The needles are green on the branch but they will eventually turn brown and cover me. Cover me like the forest floor that sleeps behind my sliding-glass door. I see through it but can't walk through it. The lake paints the ground blue, blue black at night like your eye after your brother punched you in the face and you woke up with a bloody mattress and you said you can't remember anything but I'm not sure if I believe that anymore. You wake up sometimes and just go back to sleep. And I asked your silver mirror what your face looks like and if you are the same now that you had your lights all punched out. But the mirror man didn't have an answer because he said you avoid him like he's cancer or the plague or something bigger than what he really is. He says you think that your mirror reflection will cause you to see something more and that you aren't ready to deal with that yet. But what are you ready to deal with? Do you ever really deal with anything?

I still miss drinking 40s with you, though, and the way you roll around on my couch after you sip warm absinthe and your hand runs down my spine but we don't kiss, we just sit and are silent and still and then someone walks in the room and breaks the air with some impeding talk and dismissive thoughts and I just want to go to bed but you can't go to bed when there are people in the living room talking and babbling and drowning the moment that we spent all night drinking to get to.

So I just go outside and smoke even though I really hate these cigarettes because they tether me to some redneck, white trash past. And I have spent a million years trying to convince myself that I am not that, that I am special and different and I don't like riding around in the woods and drinking bud light and I don't watch nascar and I don't even know what cotton plants look like even though all those things are false, to a varying degree, but still they are false.

But you know that and I know that so we don't have to talk about it. And I met someone new now and he makes me nervous but then I remember that I don't like being nervous and I just miss being comfortable with you in silent dark or weeping morning or whatever and you put your arm around me and you don't have to say it because we both already know it even though we pretend we don't and I'm happy I never kissed you because your face is all bruised now and I don't want that bruise to be me, too. And I bet I hurt you a lot already and I know you hurt me a lot already but I really can't remember who struck first, or why. Or maybe I can and that's what I'm blocking out tonight.