a regrettable experience

Prozac pills scattered across the floor, discarded like the innocence. Snatched away too many times, and tonight I’m as guilty as the men that do it to her. Like a butterfly in a cage, she stands in the bedroom in her underwear, skinny and vulnerable with a cigarette burning down in her hand. Imagine. Her cat eyes catch mine, so I look away and sit down slowly on the sofa with the boy that she thinks she might be in love with. The naive lust of a seventeen year old. She shouldn’t be here; the boy and I are sub letting a flat and we couldn’t let her go home alone drunk and unknowing as she is. Sleep should capture her soon, warm and familiar.

I’m tired and we curl up, the boy and I. He’s not mine and I’m not his but its a comfort to slide into sleep or temptation in the spoon position. And for me its just sex, and I know she can hear in the other room, on the same bed, the bed; he picks me up, still inside me and throws me upon the bed where she sleeps, feigns sleep. Drunk, her head swims, out of the frame while the whisky and the prescription drugs that aren’t mine obscure my conscience. Hazy glittering shapes on the ceiling, reflected from the putrid yellow of a streetlight outside, are all I can see the through the web of my eyelashes, a mesh of mascara and dewy unwanted tears.

Ice white morning light begins to stream weakly through the window and I am still awake. Snowflakes hook themselves onto the window panes and freeze there. I sit cross legged on the bed, watching, then close my eyes to stop the room swimming. Beside me, I can hear the boys breathing weighed down by sleep, rattling with tar from dirty roll up cigarettes. Next to him, she sleeps quietly, like a soft, small animal, dormant. Eventually, the door slams and drags me out of my trance, and I can tell by the weight of the air that she has left and its just me and the boy again.

A lot of the time, now, I can feel my heart skipping beats and it scares me a little. I know that next week I have to go back to sleeping alone, its a haunting and horrible thought. Thursday night, the boy is working his bar in town, and I am alone, alone like always, but in someone else’s house without the comfort of my books and records. No incense to recall the scent of better times, no comfort food and no cigarettes, just me, on someone else’s leather sofa with the glass coffee table, clear, empty and clinical with the cable of my laptop cluttering the laminate floor. Alone and guilty as a sinner, with the bitter taste of a whisky hangover still clinging to my restless lips.