you're too young & eager to love

Emere.

Right after the split with Mia.
Since apparently I got an urge to write that.
It's also vaguely depressing, go figure.

--



For months your only companion is a cat. He is long, and he stalks the shadows like a predator in direct mockery of what you used to be. You have no webs to spin now; nothing to draw in to you and hold. Other women (the ones in the novels your mother used to read, the ones that stare out at you from the glossy covers of magazines) would cry into the necks of such cats. Comfort themselves against downy fur and the feel of another breathing creature beside them at night.

You do not.

You stroke his velvet ears, but you do not whisper into them. He is only a cat; he would not understand the words.



You sleep. For weeks that is all you seem capable of. Your body lost within sheets instead of flesh and sweat. There is nothing sinewy within your bed, nothing curved and solid to claim and devour. When you wake, your eyes are heavy, and it’s easy to keep closing them. You shower when your hair, slick with oil, disturbs the backs of your shoulders and the sides of your neck. You drink coffee. Vodka. You keep a syringe within your frail arm’s reach, and you do not feel hunger.

Dust settles on your eyelids. It adds to the thick feeling in the air.

Maine visits but your doors are locked. Your phone is shut off. You told your receptionists you were on vacation; they rescheduled your appointments, so these glorious moments are yours for wallowing. These moments that become hours that turn to days. You’ve never followed a calendar besides the one your body keeps – you are an insufferable woman, and you do not change your patterns now. Not for this. This schism. This cleaving that renders you indisposed.

A part of you left with her, and you don’t remember giving it permission to stage such a coup. Her leaving was inevitable. You think, now, you caused it. Your ferocity and your bruising. Your unwillingness to mold after she found you to be something worth shaping. Maine would call this loneliness, but you befriended solitude when you were a child to the sound of your mother’s silence and the feel of her disappointment. You simply dislike change, and your apartment of chrome still smells of her – an unfair, unsettling effect that you hadn’t counted on. You dislike dependency, vulnerability, and being unraveled. You dislike ownership. It does not fit with your rebelling spirit. But even your spirit seems uncertain now, so you’re not sure what you feel.

A longing that weakens your bones.

A disconnect.