Too Late

Like some kind of new drug, I only wanted to try you. You turned me into a fog-headed, skin-suited luscious spirit, a phantom porn star with eyes six-feet-deep and legs wrapped around an unknown drifter—desperate for a mystery as the Devil is for souls. I used to feel shunned and buried alive in moments like these. Now I just take them for what they are. 

I breathe in the sex and the smoke. 

My skin crawls when I remember your affection. Like with so many things that are over, I can pretend it didn’t happen. Remembering you is like kissing a dead body. Unsatisfied, failing lips on cold skin. Proof that not even love can resurrect. 

Half-buried alive, still breathing inside my own eyes, I watched you walk away in the middle of a night that left both of us wanting. You tied a wire to my insides and pulled out my center as you slipped into the sick, yellow mist of night-fighting streetlights. The aching was exquisite and purge-worthy. I turned off the nausea because no one can stop a ghost from fading. I shrugged off the betrayal and smiled, knowing that we were both too bruised to embrace one another without agony—too cut up to lick each other’s wounds enough to stop the bleeding.

Elizabeth Jacobs is a published artist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist living in Providence, RI. She has attended workshops to hone her craft and is a member of LitArts Rhode Island. This is her first published piece.

A Song for Elizabeth