Indeterminate

An exercise in prose.

"Baby, please..." Her voice trailed off like a meandering terrier into a faint sob, and I couldn't stomach more layered apologies, more acrid tears. The fact that my words struck hard enough to crack the plating of suppression enacted upon her own emotion left me without breath, but also without pause. Directed by utterance and centrifugal pangs of distorted reality, I layed it all out; genuine feeling spread and splayed across the table like my pills for the day. Maybe the only real left in me.

"What do you want me to do, Grace? I tried, hell, I die everyday." My eyes shifted with my weight and I dug the toe of my shoe into the dirt. Gumsole traced 92110 through once tranquil earth, the day we were made. Now, faint etchings of a breaking heart. "I try for you, only ever you, babygirl. But this...this isn't wor-" Her eyes danced with mine from their position at my chest and she rushed upward from her seat at the black picnic table, the one we had painted together last Halloween.

"Always your babygirl." She reached her hand out to my face, palmed my tensing jawline and wrapped her smooth, trembling fingers about flushed chin and cheek. Through blurred vision, she stared into my soul, and cooed, "Por vida, remember, baby?"

"Grace..." Before I could attempt to wrangle any of the last remnants of apprehension from the torrent of consciousness spinning amid my ringing, searing ears, she tiptoed and pressed her lips to mine. There I was, halfway between Scylla, Charybdis, under her moist caress, and a caucophony of regret flooded, flooded and broke at a crest point alongside an urgent need. A need that sense had the will to obliterate just as her tongue was rapping and retreating delicately along my own. I pushed her away, and turned to face the street, unsure, but never more certain. A glance back was never an option.

I lit a blunt and took two drags big enough to make me an apparent candidate for a sputum culture. As I skated away, the volume in my headphones increased to the point where all I had to do was pretend she wasn't still crying on the floor behind me to appease the monster in my heart. The profligate of lack and reason that leads you questioning the assurance of your very own reliance. As it turned out, I was the monster.