Foreign Phrases

I call him. "Come over, I need cheering up."

We lay in bed eating strawberry shortcake for breakfast, watching Labyrinth, my head tucked up against his shoulder. We are going through all our favourite childhood movies and this one is my pick and the shit he scored is really good and we are floating and in this moment I am un-fucking-touchable.

But then later he mentions that he is going to have to go out of town for "a couple of days". "Business," he says. I am terrified by the thought of being alone again. I worry about the enemies I've made. I worry about my own recklessness. I'm not sure which worries me more. I pout. I plead. Can I come? But he is firm when he tells me no, and I understand in his tone that there will be no acquiescence. 

"Are you still having the dreams?" he asks. And I think of almost every night, the dreams of men kicking down my door or crawling through windows, always waiting, silent gloved predators, moving stealthily through the night. "You'll be okay," he assures me, "as long as you behave. Just please behave. Just lay low while I'm gone." 

He knows me too well. Knows the moment he said he was going, I was already contemplating whose bed I was going to climb into while he was gone. 

Even later, I tell him a little about how I reached out to her. I talk of the desperation, the sick pooling of need I feel inside myself when it comes to her. I don't cry. Didn't cry when she told me she couldn't talk to me, when she said goodbye. I think I felt nothing. Did I expect it? Maybe it's the drugs? Or is it that I'm no longer that fawn, terrorized by slamming doors and unreturned emotions. As a wolf, I just slink back to my den, unfazed, reassured that the world is as brutal as expected. 

I tell him:

"I guess what it is is that the person I loved is gone, the person I keep looking for doesn't exist anymore. So I'll just keep grasping at a ghost. So it doesn't hurt much when they slip away because I know it's not real, just a remembering of something that once felt like home but now is just a place I once went."