Universal Remedy

I awoke in a puddle of drool, uncertain of how I’d made it home. 
I remember flashing lights and blaring Boston, a sage singer supplicating for some Peace of Mind. In an attempt to obtain my own such peace, I wiped mine clean with straight shots of 151. The music of ice on glass shimmered like chimes in the wind. One lonely finger above a clenched fist.
Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.
There isn’t enough, is there?
The hardest cue is exeunt. I wished her well, and I ardently hope that it was sincere. I’m not positive that it was. I thought of intertwined legs in the fledgling hours; stolen kisses at a cousin’s wedding; hollow promises never filled. Martyrs with no cause: dead anyways, and pretty fucking pissed about it. 
The promises are very pretty, though—until you hold them up to the light. They absorb nothing, reflect everything, and when you tentatively lift a hand to touch, you suddenly realize that there wasn’t anything there. It went somewhere, you’re sure, but you’re just as sure that you can’t follow it, not safely, not and remain yourself. I’m too valuable to be traded for one nebulous, flighty promise.
My smile has curdled; too toothy; a rictus grimace promising vengeance; a vicious snarl that clamors of the kill. Misplaced in some wayward sector of these synapses, a chemical formula languishes unused; the sovereign specific; the universal remedy. Dose me quick: I’ll hold my nose and shut my eyes, and do my damnedest to consume regrets with forgets, can’t gets with can gets.
She tasted on my tongue something sour; a pillar of salt in the cavern of a bitter gourd. I was running from a memory, and her lips were my shoes.  My hands began to wander; not fast enough, so she put them where she wanted them.  She was soft yet firm, well-formed, like a lithe pillow, and I needed a place to rest my head.  It’s laden with heavy thoughts and iron determination.
Wisdom. Gone with no goodbye.
They said I studied the doorframe for a long moment, apparently mystified, possibly affronted. There’s wordwork in that woodwork—profundity—an acknowledgment of one phase passing, blending, defragmenting and coalescing into another.  The bar was loud, I think, and the clamor chased me out.  My breath fogged.  I thought, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and laughed wryly in the fogged Friday night.  I know my eyes burned with some terrible hybrid; fire mixed with tears and forged in the continuous crucible.
I peeled my eyelids back like the skin of an orange; nonchalantly and without difficulty. I removed my eyeballs, and resolved to go by feel alone.  The walk home felt short on my shivering feet.
The world is darker but the future’s bright.