early evening hoodoo

When the phone rings, I’m in the bath. Click the line and hold the receiver to my ear. Listen. The quality of Jules. His recognizable tone. Music. But there’s something in the way. Seize the opportunity to say the word – stop. And in that instant we are silence. I don’t know what’s pressing against him from every side, but I’m immersed. Floating. Door locked. Glasses of cold crisp vodka filtering through the blood. Sanctuary, he whispers. Knowing that the very inhalation behind the word is some kind of secret rising out of his soul. Tapping my ear drums like fingers against the spine. We talk in stilted rhythms. About the ways in which we spin our own useless cycles. The words merely symbols of our individual and empty meaningless reposes. Pause unavoidably. Gloss. Omit. Tell each other the lies we both want to believe. Life. Love. Happiness. Every inch of the conversation a walk across thinly self constructed ice. Stained with lilacs and daffodils – ink and satiation. We are hopeless – reckless and together we build houses that will inevitably be burnt down. Each to each – we reduce ourselves to smoke and ashes. But this is what we have. The truths we hold too tightly choking themselves out from the backs of our throats every Friday night through the haze of too much alcohol and so many sleepless nights. I’m the truth rolled into a lie about somebody else’s godforsaken memory, I stumble. But he’s already gone. Constructing pitiful excuses of his own -- about the ways in which he can only find love between a woman’s thighs. I listen and think about what it feels like to not feel like this.