“You’re doing really good, yeah? Can you feel it?” She tells me I’m her sweetheart and she has one hand on my shoulder. My feet are planted on the floor and they stick out straight forward. Little details don’t matter. They don’t matter.
“Just hold it a few more seconds,”
She whispers something awful in my ear and when I try to pick my feet up something oozes out of me. There’s a paper being ripped to shreds at my trash can. I know it, I hear it, but when I look up all I see is her and the pill bottle.
To the left of me is my left hand and to the right of me is my right hand but down the middle is a happy-trail, glowing with silver. The knife she puts in me has dirt packed into the crevices. 1937. It’s a forest green.
One of the men in my family fought in Vietnam. When he died it was painless but we didn’t throw a party. A heavy fog going in and out of our houses every day, the sugar-coated tablets in the bathroom expired in 2009. 2012. 2017.
She tells me that the little details don’t matter.
My knees are shaking and she grabs my shoulder harder.
“Don’t be such a tease.” A breath, a curling drip down the side of my neck. The words that leave her mouth are followed by a laugh.
I take it out and she pushes it back in. I grab the knife with my right hand and with my left hand I grip the sheets, I’m shaking. I’m shaking. My hand is wet and she is cold. My shoulder has saliva on it from her drool but when I go to wipe it off she isn’t there anymore.
There is a drip in the back of my throat.
Like menthol. Like tobacco.
She sits in the corner of my room and I ask her,
“You know where the tobacco fields are?”
There’s something akin to gold mine in my mind, it’s a shade of green you see at a family farm. A garden. A man in a truck smiles and winks. I call him something I have never heard of.
She tells me she has no idea what that is.
“Early America,”I tell her, and then,
“My great-uncle died from a heart attack. They never could figure out the cause.”
She tells me that the little details don’t matter and she crosses her legs. Blood pours from her nose and when I go to look at the happy trail the knife is gone.
The waiting game goes on for too long and when I stand up I fall down. At my side she throws cold fingers at my hair and tells me she knows what is best for me and I trust her.
“I never wanted to see you curl I just wanted to rock the cradle.” She tells me and I look her dead in the eyes and tell her that The little details don’t matter.
When I look up at the ceiling the popcorn tile is starting to fall. The peeled shards of white reveal a debilitating darkness and she holds my hand through it. There is a masking in its suffocation but all we see is its glory. The world is not ending but stuck between the crevices of conscious breathing and a cord being pulled from a socket.
“You almost there?” She asks me.
I will owe her one million times over until the solar system spins backwards.
I let her know I never want to see the world burn and she tells me that from the start I would have never had the chance.
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yeah hi this is still making me insane 2 hrs later. love u