This is Why You're Single

She is your crowbar, your vodka chaser, the loudest fastest punk song you ever heard. She’d eat what you discard; she’d lick up your saliva, bathe in your sweat. She is a tick, thick on your blood, sickening on your scent. She’d drive across desert to get to you, even in this wet green land where she’d need a major detour to even find desert. She would, for you.

She is your mistake to make, & you know what you will do. You will detour around your life for a day, a week, a year. You will feed her on poetry, wine, engraved chocolates. You will let her grow fat on you.

You will consider staying. You will imagine life with this scattershot pillarbox muffin of a girl; you will wonder if she could fix the knife-edge cross-hair details of you. You will look for gold in her; scrounge through her insides for the glint of coins, so sure that there is treasure. You will find kidneys & anger & bent cogs & red blood cells & mixtapes & tarnished keys & bone marrow & everything except that glint of gold.

By then she will have scratched at your surface, pushed the dirt of your skin right under her fingernails. She will keep the bits of you there, pushed down with toothpicks so they won’t wash away. You won’t even notice that the dirt is gone, but she will. She will keep scraping that dirt away until your skin shines like apple-peel, until her face is reflected in it.

But then when she is too full to run, so gorged that she can only fumble around & grasp between her palms, you will let go. She will topple, this leech full to bursting. She will rupture like a glob of mercury.

Later, you will miss the taste of her: that sicksweet reek of lust & desperation. You will wonder if you could have glued the parts of her together; that cross-hair detail of yours would ensure that the cracks did not show. You could have made her softer, cooler, harder, hotter. You could have made her. You could.

But she wouldn’t really be soft; she’d just be less hard. She wouldn’t be hot; just thawed at the edges, frozen at her centre. She’d memorise all the words, everything you ever said, & she’d twist it around so it sounded clean & new, so you’d think that she was.

So the sun & the snow will fall, & you will sleep along with the day. Before sleep you will think about stopping & you will think about running. Finally you will realise that you had fun; & end-of-a-chapter fun is what it’s all about. You have a party, you take a photo, then everyone goes home & it’s another thing to think about in the endless moments before sleep.

Of course, you will forget that your dirt is still under her fingernails. You will forget that the taste of her still sticks to the inside of your cheeks.