And In Hospitals.

I do like hospitals. If parts of you were to crease and fail in the waiting room, you’d be closer to safe than at home in the arms of someone you love. Yet I’m waiting for over an hour for someone to take this spidery tube out of my arm so I can walk home, thrumming my fingers on the opposite wrist. Each time I look at it my stomach flinches. The nurse misplaced the vein, apologising, and I felt jinxed but also at fault. I suppose the last few days have seemed fairy bloodless. Breathe, I’m Not Doing It On Purpose, I Promise. And she laughs. 
Trust my heart to be wonky. My own jumpy love is just a symptom, I look at the x-rays they take and do not see any of myself or anybody else in the dirty outline, but there it is. The monitor keeps extending angry fingers out, terse insults and flashing PVC on the screen, which means Premature Ventricular Contraction. 
My heart is jumping the gun, beating twice then pausing. It’s in the pause I recognise it as unequivocally me, there is no doubting you are mine. 

Across the hall somewhere a young man’s wailing upsets me each time it starts up. He’s reverted to the extremes of youth and his cries are raw, gaudy and animalistic. This happens three times before the emergency bells start bleating and somebody yells for a trolley. Hearing other people in pain seems to tighten a band around my lungs, I keep wincing long after he’s pulled away. 

And it’s around 4am when the sloppy teenagers begin trickling in and my phone vibrating in my pocket, this Irish guy wanting to take me home. I leave by myself instead, watching a young guy on a gurney being kissed by a young girl in a little skirt. There’s something strangely happy in that.

Come home to wake still with these meditrace stickers scattered across my chest and this bruise on the inside of my elbow that makes me feel a lot more innocent than I am. 

No drugs, no caffeine, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no added sugar or salt. I keep on staring at this x-ray I have of my heart and imagining its earnest contractions as they happen.
We are doing our best. 

Soppy Stupid Serenade

All I could do was cross my fingers. So tight my bones burned, knuckles red and white. Pulling my back teeth together in an uneven embrace. No arms just curves. Greeting you in a public place, my limbs would link up across your back [maybe like bars. Maybe like liquorish straps. Maybe like poisoned vines or lengths of scents that reminded you of other lovers] , yours would stay almost by your side. Like a red flag to every pair of eyes: I don’t really like this one. I don’t know what I’m doing, really. Should have said something. When our feet didn’t match on the street, because yours were always two steps ahead of mine. No matter how much I changed pace, like you were trying to pretend you weren’t with me. That to passing cars we were two strangers, one just crossing paths with the other. Two young people in a city brimming with just that. Youth and lack of inhibitions.

But I think, now. You have too many. Wise beyond your years, sure. But jaded more than old-soul-esque. Calculated problems stripping layers from sanity you wear between your ears. Been reading things on what to do, now. Every answer says I have to hate you. So, fuck you. Fuck you because I just wanted to rub the frowns on your forehead to velvet. Fuck you for all the evenings I would climb that stupid fucking hill, checking my face on the corner [where the streetlights came through the trees]. Fuck you for never making an effort to meet me anywhere. Or my friends. They don’t even know how your face falls. That one time I lit a cigarette outside, heard you playing guitar through your forever closed curtains. And fuck me for smiling at that. Fuck me for listening to your album and feeling shit about myself, for NO REASON. Fuck me for running and running and running in the hopes that you would comment on my legs again. Or stop to look at me in the morning, when I left again, you dressing with your back to me. Watching my own hand reach out and stop, thinking my hand might burn right through your skin. Fuck me for early morning planning, shaving my legs after ten kilometres. Just in case you touched them.

But also I take all that back. I just hope you will be happy, like I was, with my head on shoulder.