Ad nauseam

Without you.

I am without dreams, but without nightmares. My liberty is a limbo, but your paradise had been my purgatory. Somewhere between my tragedy and your cowardice, my garden of Eden began to look like the Death Row―and surely love deserves death more than any other crime, because it's deliberate from the start. But I only grew feeble and exhausted; I could not cut you. My excuses were like paper dolls―neat, flimsy, two-dimensional.

'Are you over him?' I was asked, kindly, before.
'Almost,' I gave a neutral heave, in my effort not to condemn his. How can a white lie feel so filthy?

And now you're coming back for your―jaunt. Your fix. Your hobby. And I will comply, because saying no has never been an option. I will be there, just as I have been, mechanical nerves and programmed reality, buttons in place, switches thrown. I would remember where you've entered, where you've left. How it is always empty, hollow―but then you make it permanent. It. My heart. This expendable body. For a few hours it would all be all right. And then you would say the obvious before leaving, and in response I would puppet the same lines, and then we part pretending we know all about love. You would go back to your perfect world. I would stay and examine the pieces of mine.

Why. I don't even have strength for questioning anymore, but then I am betrayed by my own curiousity. Why not. Why not―me. Only good for entertainment, this stowaway heart. Stealing miles abroad someone else's love. It's like I've become a mother for you: breeding strange children of verse and melancholy and rancid rhymes. Children that feed on my bleeding. You can be selfish to a fault, and I―stupid beyond redemption.

Time. Runs its lonely fingers through my hair, drawing out the kinks, breaking strands, the strays clinging, brittle. And now time is greying, slowly, to another curtain call as I dust out my costume and pretend, once more, that I am both the chorus and narrator to my little Greek tragedy. C'est bon, oui?