Crumpled and worn out from being held onto too much, the cigarette pack sat on my nightstand right where you left it, I counted five more left and though I loathed the taste of nicotine ; I grasped at the package and lit one up anyhow. It was a contrast to the warmth that your lips allowed and the usual remnants on the end that was left by your lipstick, but it smelt like the nicotine that would linger in your hair and clothes when you'd visit. Promising you were working on quitting the habit, you were always working on quitting that habit, but I always smelt it on you. If only you could see me now, you'd call me a sellout and mention the look of distaste on my face whenever you would stick one between your lips but it was the only thing that kept the feeling of you around. I suppose Morris was right: "I am beside her in this imagination [...] where the water is darker [...] we live in what kills us." I've died a plethora of calamitous deaths at your hands and the bloodshed has never been as potent as now, but the warmth of your hands on my skin was illusive, it wasn't as warm as the actual touch. "The sun is always so golden with freckles of a fiery crimson, I wish I were that way." You'd coo as you laid beside me, the fluorescence of it all loitering on your skin, painting you as effulgent as the sun and I was too ambivalent to tell you ; you were golden. I piqued you an engulfing flame and an inundate sea all at once ; rapturing me in sweet naivety and malevolence. I piqued you a pretty red sealing wax on the torn envelope of a lost letter at the bottom of a wooden box of momentums. I piqued you the last track on a Bill Withers vinyl as we're dancing in an evening set living room grasping almost empty wine glasses. I piqued you a midnight drive with Cigarettes After Sex on and you'd whisper you loved me between the lyrics and your breaths. I piqued you a painting of Starry Night on your back, the indents of your body only heightening how pretty the stars were. I piqued you everything but manic, fleeting, and lethal ; an interval between one track and the next.
