blowing tombs through lunar wombs

<br

i tell him that i am having trouble breathing.

he tells me that the pain is normal, that beings such as myself are not meant for breathing.

i sometimes remember the days that i would take to the city streets, my head down and a half smoked cigarette in my right hand. the hand i use for everything except dealing cards. he always used to ask me why i always used the right. and i said because it will be the hand i someday use to kill a man. he did not know that when i said that, i was referring to myself. but when i spoke of city streets it was always in relation to him. he was the cause of my feet meeting hard concrete. many times i was barefoot. when barefoot i swore i could feel the heart of the city pumping slowly beneath me, reverberate through the pores of my skin. he called me crazy.

if i am insane then so is the city, and everyone feeding off its life-force.

i have memories strewn all about this faded room, blue-tacked to pastel pink walls and resting on dull grey carpet. i have tried to place them in chronological order so often, but linear time was always one concept these hands could not grasp. i fear the day that i will return from a rendezvous with the concrete streets to find my life in neat piles along my bedroom wall. i cannot be placed in piles arranged chronologically. i am comfortable in this mess.

he tells me that i am the polar opposite of myself.

my love is messy, i retort, as is the rest of me.

i was once told that the only way i would stay alive was to lock my heart inside a box of confessions, because whoever tried would never sift their way through them all and find my heart. keeping my heart safe is well and good, but i was always reckless with things that are not mine to begin with. i lost all my compassion to destiny in a poker game three years ago, the stakes were high but i was riding on cloud nine and i bet you wish you knew me then. i was a different girl then. i wore my hair beneath my shoulders and brown, i never wore make-up and i would have had no hesitation in leaving a packet of cigarettes out in the rain.

cigarettes have an addictive personality; each one knows a different secret of mine.

things are different now. i look in the mirror and i do not see the pretty girl they once did, i never saw the pretty girl. i dream of different things now, of sitting across from you, of your hands on my skin. i dream of coming back to this faded room and seeing my life rearranged, but still messy, and knowing that you took the time to go through it all and make it out alive. i will still walk the city streets, alone and barefoot. and i will still smoke with my right hand and deal with my left.

i tell him i am having trouble breathing.

he tells me it is because my cigarettes know too much.