pleasure seekers

I was sitting on my bed with my legs crossed in a pretzel like I used to sit when I was small. My hands were placed in my lap, and I couldn’t stop fidgeting. I felt like I needed to move to remind myself I was alive. The voices inside my head told me that I needed to breath, to blink, to purse my lips and refrain from saying everything I was thinking but couldn’t convey to him.

My head tilted up and I focused only on him, his stubbly chin, his hair that had grown so long, his backbone jutting out from behind him and his shoulders, that though I knew weren’t broad in the slightest had felt so protecting and so safe I had once believed they stretched for miles. 

He was getting dressed normally, like any other day as my mind exploded into confusion, chaos, crazy. I was crazy. He was right there, inches from me, we had just been laying down together, but I felt like he was moving backwards, and no matter how far my fingers stretched out, grasping, begging him not to go, they slipped. I slipped, he left. And I was alone, I was so alone because everything was ending and nothing that made me happy ever stayed in my life.

I knew I would never make it to the other side of the nation, and I knew I wouldn’t fall in love in a coffee shop, nor would I be stopped and told I was magnificent, because in truth, I really wasn’t. I was a nobody. I had come so far, and then I had gone just too far, and I had plummeted over the edge, dropping from the highest precipice that I had ever known, hearing my talents be laud from the mountaintops by the people that I had never wanted to love me. I wanted them to be the voices that i yeared for, that I needed to prove that I could do it: I could be successful.

I knew that it was just me and my open window and the scent of tobacco and febreeze as I smoked my sins away, then tried to cover it up as I pretended my innocense still existed, as I made myself believe in being naive. I watched Manhattan swarm in the distance, so close, yet so far, blinking with the hope of tomorrow and the shattering glass of dreams being broken second after second after second.