Defective

I’m driving.

            I’m always driving. I prefer it after midnight. My hand is limp on the steering wheel and my foot is only resting on the gas. I have no direction. Something about streetlights, or headlights, or break lights, or starlight makes me think of every moment of my life simultaneously; like one of those montages in a movie. I’m on some street stopping briefly because a sign told me to. A new song by an old band is playing and it happens.

            They come all at once, not sorted by time or person. Maybe sorted by a feeling I vaguely remember. It was important once I know, but I don’t know how to tell what is or will be important anymore. The drums kick in and it all sounds familiar.

I’m remembering a soft hand squeezing mine in a house I’ll probably never return to; its fingers lacing through mine. I acted like I didn’t care, but it was the first hand I let roam over mine in years. The same soft hand is wrapped around my waist, its owner is wrapped around me and I can’t catch my breath or quiet the sounds coming out of my mouth.

            Then it’s a rough hand pushing down on my pelvis and the same sounds are escaping me. My hands claw for sheets and air. It hurts and it’s fine and it was love. It was love, I’m sure, but it doesn’t feel like I want. I was broken. That’s what we decided.    

            I’m turning into a neighborhood I’ve only been in to turn around and head back the way I came. There was a time I accidentally lit a trashcan on fire with a cigarette that wasn’t done burning. I never leave the cherry unattended anymore. All the nights in the park on that cold metal bench blur together. Every time feels like an epiphany and the right time to have one. Whether it’s the warmth of the tea and my favorite sweatshirt or the sound of her voice when she convinces me I’m not a complete failure, I don’t know. When she leaves it all feels the same and what was said those nights only come back when the streetlights are flickering.

            I shared so many nights with a pair of tired green eyes and cigarette smoke; in the garage, on curbs, in parking lots, in the back of that old truck, on the roof. Then I stared at them like I had so many times and they led me to bed. Like the brown ones, and the blue ones that came first. I loved them all I think. Or I thought I did, which doesn’t make a difference. Those green eyes still burn though. Like that cigarette that never went out. They all do. Whether it’s imagined or sincere. They burn and I can’t stop wondering when it’ll all die down.

           

            The nicotine is stinging my throat and the smoke is caught in my eyes. The mascara’s dried like a child’s Halloween face paint. I haven’t felt so much like myself in months. With all these tears you’d think I felt it all. I just remember though, I don’t feel it at all anymore.