#Day 920: Graveyard Shifts

This love’s beginning to feel like a grave, we’re boxed in, shutting each other out day after day.

I wake up some days with the sun streaming in and bringing alive the swirls of dust in our room, it sets the browns apart from the greys and makes my mind swim. When I finally leave the warmth of the covers and place my feet on the cold floor, I can’t stand straight. I hobble to the mirror. I don’t think anyone would recognize the girl who looks back at me. Her skin is coloured with splashes of blue and purple, her lips are red and her hair’s a mess.

I don’t know the girl in the mirror.

When I watch you leave at quarter to eleven from the kitchen, shirt tucked in, hair combed back, you remind me of the people we were a few months ago. But when you return at sundown; unruly, inebriated, unaware, incoherent; I can’t quite place where I conjured the memories from. We’re nothing like those young kids with dreams and youth and time at our fingertips.

I don’t know the girl standing with her head bowed down at the sink.

Sometimes when you come home at 1 AM and I hear the front door creak and whimper under your hands, it tells me of what I’m going to sound like too. And you hurl into the sink and throw yourself in bed and I lay, dead silent, hoping you’ll fall asleep this night, hoping your rage has died as my strength has.

I don’t know the girl lying in bed.

I’m not the girl with a swollen lip, not the girl in the apron, I’m not the girl who sleeps with a knife under her pillow.
You are the man who wakes up at noon, lights a cigarette, puts it out on my arm and leaves me wondering how we lost our conscience. You are the man who kisses his knuckles before they touch me, the man who rips apart everything.

I’m leaving. I’m leaving this house, this mirror, this kitchen, this bed. I’m leaving you to your means, leaving you to your bottles and cold feet and dirty socks, leaving you to your grimy fists and whiskey breath.

This love was beginning to feel like a grave, and now I’ve buried and bid my goodbyes ceremoniously too.