seven thousand

And suddenly sex feels disgusting again.

I spend hours in the shower trying

To scrub fingerprints from my skin

From the men who trespassed on my former self.

But I am back again, there’s no clock to tell

How long it will be this time.

Going through months of destroyed credit cards and savings accounts and dating apps,

The dishes rotting in the sink that will never be properly clean -

. I will never be properly clean.

God how I hate her.

She is part of who I am and I hate her like teeth hate concrete

And no matter how many times I shake her from my legs

Like a child

Shes there

The half of me

The impulse tattoos the seventy dollar shoes that I can’t return

she’s as real as I am now. The baseline state.

And we are both of us fleeting

Always flexing into the other

The hard lines blurred along the edges as if looking at a person through a fog.

I think the hardest part is to admit

That everyone likes me better when I’m manic.

Blown pupils, energy like a dog that has never touched grass.

A gaze that can stop people in their tracks.

Maybe I am closer to god in the endless teeth gritting, ringing in my ears.

But god does not pick up the mess left in her aftermath, I do.

She runs our hollow body, shared, into a deeper grave every year

And I don’t know how much longer I can keep clawing my 125 pound frame up the sides of a rough hewn hill.

i’m getting too old, too tired.

Wandering over the edge with cruel men —

. or some that just don’t understand

The duality.

“why aren’t you as fun as you used to be?”

Fun.

Clawing my organs from the insides out.

So fun.

I want to scream at them and thrash and kick and explain that my “free spirit”

Is a sickness.

She needs help.

But no one is keen to quit the party, even when I start crying about the spiders in the corners.

The buzzing in the bones when they rub end on end if this is being close to god

Let me forget her.

But here I am

Always coming back to pick up the pieces. The ruined marriage, failing career, deleting all the porn, shuffling through papers to find out exactly how much she blew through this time

Seven thousand dollars.

I will never be clean of her.

i’m trying to love her as some dirty part of myself like sunlight shining through milk glass.

How can I love a source of so much shame?

Maybe I should ask my father.

But i’m not sure

He loves us anymore.