#photo is by citlali haro | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

candiedspit · 2 years

Text

Hypochondria

Tomorrow it will be all champagne and light and that deep undercarriage of a voluptuous sadness; a forever pang. Tomorrow my tide will turn into oblivion and I will walk as I was meant to walk with the others snubbed by time. Tomorrow it will all be over with. Tomorrow, thirty. I say it with a touch of my teeth.

I have built a little life for myself; a light box.

I have black, gnarly cigars in the afternoon as I read The Post, pretending I am a business man waiting on a very important call. Any minute, the white house. My mouth tastes of rye and soot. And in the evenings, I pair my cigarettes with a tall, beaming glass of hot milk. I spend my time well. I go out on the rooftop naked as a seal as my laundry hangs from pink plastic clips and dries in the upheavals of a great wind. Nobody sees me aside from the sun, that glorious bastards in his spins of heaven. I walk from corner to corner beneath a pair of violet sunglasses; I love only mangled hearts. My latest rose was an inmate at the penitentiary. His name was Mark. In photos he sent, he is dark haired and tall and with the face of someone who would walk on a tightrope for the chance to be held. That Bukowski nose. He loved honey bees, the glean of a sharpened knife and the idea of me.

I spritzed my letters with vanilla perfume and admitted my sins in ballpoint. I’m a bad whore, I confessed once. Just the muddied technicolor slick coating the streets once the rain has passed. A dream you had as a child, sick in bed with dengue.

Do you ever get so sad you can’t walk? He asked in return.

I never replied again.

I taped the letter up above my bed where it still rests. He sent one last letter a few weeks later which simply read: Darling? I couldn’t bring myself to answer him, his glaring question. I often dreamt of him and I in a tugboat. In the dreams, we danced against the backdrop of a wondrous moonlight, free as animals. I miss him as one misses childhood. But to the plains you can never return. He touched me with his ink. But we could not have lasted. He was in for fifteen more years. He never told me what he had done. Just something awful.

In the photos I sent him, my hair is bleached and cut three inches above my shoulders. I stare into the camera as though it could love me. But nothing ever does. I don’t deserve him. Or anything much. I’m a Leviathan, a creep. In the very pit of my soul is a desire for carnage. I would hurt you given the chance. And I would not look back. As a child, my mother told me I ought to be a starlet. But I have nothing to offer. She must have mistaken this cruelty for attraction. If you scooped your hand into my skull, you would come back up with a fist full of dirt. So, I keep myself away, tucked in corners nobody can reach.

For the last ten years, I have worked as a telephone girl, someone men call when they are unable or unwilling to allow themselves the grace of touch. When a mere voice is enough. I am fast, quick and easy. I say all the right things. No hang ups, apologies or arguments. I speak, tease and hang up. I call them sweetheart and leave. My hours are from ten in the evening to four in the morning. The sea of men beckons through the night: Fonda, Fonda, Fonda! My name is the sound the mind makes in a silent room.

My apartment is speckled with porcelain cats and bras and orange wigs and sheer curtains and seashells and emptied pill bottles. I drink from long glasses. I do not do the dishes.

Ruby wants to take me out tonight.

Ruby is my only friend, someone I met at a karaoke bar at eighteen when I was all pleated skirts and lipsticks and mangos. When I hadn’t yet realized how deep my black root ran. Ruby is a beautiful person. She works in a cafe, has many friends and does many things. But each week she carves out hours for me. Sometimes we talk shit for hours, the words babbling over themselves. Other times, we sit in front of the television like infants, dumb and silent and content with light and noise.

Ruby is due to arrive soon.

I put out my burning cigarette and rise from the velvet of the couch and put on a fresh pot of coffee. I dress myself in a simplistic black dress with stretched stockings covering my pink, smooth legs. Chandeliers hang from my ears. As I straighten my hair again, the doorbell rings out a penetrative aria. And suddenly — Ruby is there in an olive green dress coating her body like the prettiest of cellophane. Her hair is especially red, burning through the daylight like the first fire from which humanity was birthed. In which humans realized exactly what they were and imagined what they could be. Her naked shoulders are exposed and smattered with freckles. I kiss her on the mouth and she steps inside.

We are going to the ballet. For a few hours, we will sit in the midst of a crowd and watch the thin, elegant dancers twirl and leap and stagger through the bliss of music and lace. Mozart will play overhead like some kind of dream. And in the morning, the world will be over with.

Let some light in for Christs’ sake, Ruby says, getting up to split the curtains open. Sunlight blasts through the room like the shine of an atom bomb.

I should not have let myself live.

#my poetry #little story that i cant quite figure out lol #photo is by citlali haro #fiction

72 notes · View notes