MAGNETIC [H.S.]

39. the otherness came

songs:
learning to live without you - Hajaj
as it was - hozier

Sitting on my bedroom floor eating stale cereal out of a cardboard box is not exactly how I imagined my Christmas Eve going.

Zayn had come by that morning, he knocked for a while and sent me a few texts, but eventually left. He left a gift basket abandoned in my hallway which someone stole because it was gone when I came back from my walk.

I'd been walking around half of the block every day to force myself to move. Not a whole block, that's too far. I cut through an alley walk behind a building to avoid straining myself. I didn't want to push it.

Every day was starting to blend together, it was a milky haze of anger and the overwhelming ache that a part of me was missing. A few parts really, and they all burned in my chest like the exit wounds of bullet holes. My dreams were torture, always his voice in my ear and his hands on my body. Sometimes they were car rides with Louis in my little beetle back in Florida, sunshine and cigarette smoke, and then his gut would start to bleed and it felt like mine was too.

I was trying to learn how to live without them again. The charred pictures from the balcony still sat on the tray, abandoned on my kitchen counter with the dirty dishes that had piled up. The clothes he had were still in my drawers and hung in my closet. His shoes were still piled by my door. Thinking about gathering his things made me want to drink myself into a stupor, which I had done for several nights.

My ashtray was overflowing, I was smoking more than I had in my entire life. I would sit on the cold balcony and smoke a full pack of blues until my lungs burned and my lips were chapped. In fact, that sounded lovely after my stale breakfast. I bundled up in a sweatshirt and my long puffer coat. I put on socks but didn't bother with pants, I didn't have the energy. I sat in the pathetic excuse for a chair that was sun-bleached and long past its prime and I lit another cigarette. "Oh fuck." I mumbled around it as it rested on my lips. It was the last one in my pack, which meant that I had to go out again. Putting pants on sounded so tiring.

I knew I needed to shower though, it had been a few days. My teeth and tongue needed to be brushed and my skin needed to be scrubbed. Sometimes I would stand in the shower and look at the floor until the water ran cold, just remembering how it felt to squeeze my body into this tiny bathtub with him. Remembering how he'd kiss my knees and then hang his legs out of the tub so I had more room. Remembering how the water would splash and soak the floor when he'd bring his body over mine and kiss me with wet lips. Other days I scrubbed my skin like I could shed the feel of him on me. Like I could shed every skin cell that he'd touched and be brand new so that maybe the ghost of his touches wouldn't bring me to my knees.

I was trying though. I was trying to live and to process and to move on. I tried to delete pictures but I cried so hard that I only deleted a few. I could make it into work and that was a big enough success for me. I had finally charged my phone and just turned off every notification possible. I didn't check it very often though because the number of text messages in that little red bubble tended to overwhelm me.