There are days where all I can manage is pulling a bottle off the shelf, unscrewing the cap and drinking until a thick, impenetrable haze has wound itself around my eyes and knotted at the base of my skull.
Sometimes the next morning, the knots there have tightened enough to make me believe my own fury was trying to choke me in my sleep.
I’d be angry that you walked away, if you had. I could be angry if you’d sworn and slammed the door and stomped off — I could be angry if you’d wept and slunk away to lick your wounds, or even if you’d mutely disappeared–or, shit, even if I’d found you in the goddamned closet, a belt of mine around your neck in a sort of last-call “No, fuck you,” directed at yours fucking truly.
I could be angry, then, and in time, all that fury would piss itself out and shrivel up to be little more than the kind of troubling dreams you can’t remember.
What I can’t do is let go of this rage that’s got me by the balls, lifting me up on tiptoes to creep around, in constant agony and simple fear, my breath a caught and ragged thing. I can’t be anything other than mad, for what you’ve gone and done, but it’s the kind of madness that won’t go, won’t heal, won’t leave, won’t anything but stay.
This ring on my finger is all I have left to remember you by, and it’s getting so I’d like to take it off. Except the circle stays there, wrapped tight around my flesh, a marker that I can’t really erase.
How dare you let me live? It’s not that I was content, before this, but I managed.
I can still smell you in the house, in my clothes and in the bed. In the pillows. On my skin. It’s too soon to have forgotten your face, but I’m trying. If I have to go through every bottle in the flat today, I’ll drown the memory of you before you come home. And then, by the time you don’t, the ring around my finger that’s there after I take off the ring around my finger will have faded, and I’ll be mine again.
