Wardrobe Worm

I’m next to you and yet, there’s something unreachable in your slumber, like I shouldn’t witness peace on your face, like I don’t deserve it. I’ve been awake for hours now, looking at the funny faces in my coffee. Poor reflections of a self I once knew.

The bed is warm on your side and the shape you built yourself into seems too narrow to let me fit. I’m outside of softness, half-spurned by its gentle hands. I’m punished.

The fan makes me feel like I’m underwater, a horse in the sea trying to reach the sun. But I ain’t got no wing, I ain’t got no gills even, to insufflate the blueness into my wrecked body. I can only watch faith unfold like the freshly washed curtains I hang on my window. I can only watch it get comfortable on my pillow. I can only sink.

The dream in which I reach the surface is dark and nauseating. I’m still abandoned. I inhale only to watch myself die again.

I’m so pale I swear my heart’s on some boat, getting seasick. Or maybe it’s the coffee-mirror that makes my stomach sway. I often find mirrors where there aren’t. Mirror in tea cups, mirror in the diner’s table, mirror in your eyes.

I wait for you, I always do, you know? I wait for the moment you’ll look at me, first thing in the morning. I yearn and yearn and yearn. And you’ll always find me folded into your creaks, like a forgotten shirt waiting in the same damp wardrobe as ever, a shadow of our shame, always. I’d like to copy the curve of your neck and make it my signature. I remember you where I shouldn’t. In the smile of a stranger, in the flies dancing under the dying sun, in the beating sound I hear when I’m drunk. It’s the easiest tempo. It’s your heart living inside my head. The memory of my temple on your chest. The dream where you’re the ocean and I let you swallow me.

— Monday Boy