Love Sick Delerium

Part 1

The room temperature is wringing sweat from my body. I am awash in electrolytes setting comfortably on my skin. My tongue is a desert, and my chest comes up short of a full breath. Heavy humidity hangs above my skin like flannel sheets. These summer nights are cooler than the oven heat filled days that I am accustomed to, and this heat bearing down on me is a fleeting glimpse of comfort compared to the waking hours I will endure soon enough.

How anyone can concentrate, live, function, or think in this God forsaken climate is a complete mystery to me. To make matters worse, these last 87 hours, 32 minutes and 56 seconds have been pure misery. Not because of heat, sweat, humidity, or the lack of air movement, but thats when she took my apartment key from her keychain after a lengthy crying spell and placed it on my countertop and left with the door still ajar. I could hear each deliberate footstep hammering down the stairwell, hear her open her car door, hear the faulty ignition struggle to turn and lastly hear the tires move along the gravel as she drove away. A cacophonous misery that got louder as she drove further from my heart, my home and my eyes.

Her love is a searing serrated knife plunged deep into my chest and stinging, burning, cutting as it enters, its almost a soothing pain as it rests in my chest cavity and solders my capillaries and veins shut from the heat. Still and unmoving it doesn't hurt, I can function everyday with the knife of her love and no blood escapes unless I writhe in pain. Its best just to sit in that moment of stillness that is her piercing love and let her penetrate my rough exterior, seeking my heart, and seeking my soul. The problem is I fear when her love grows cold and moments have her in just a way that she might think to withdraw her love from my pitch black soul, and aching and shriveling heart. Just a single second of a thought and I can feel the blades serrated edges tear at my flesh slowly, droplets of blood form around my love wound. Then finally the day that had kept me shuttered in distress arrives knocking at my door wildly, violently and all too suddenly. The knife so quickly plunged to my heart and sinking me into a deep amorous slumber of love and pain never known is reversed this day, but not so quickly this time.

"As it went in, it shall not come out."

She says to me with her cruel but beautiful eyes. I see her grasp the handle and twist once to the left turning my body down towards the floor. I hang there limp like a rag doll slumped over to one side. I am without control, totally at the whims of my lover, my assailant. She slowly pulls one serrated edge out away from my tearing flesh with blood rushing forth soaking my clothes, I am drenched. She pulls another serrated edge out closer to her, she pulls one by one staring me in the eye as she crushes me and tears my heart in two. Then its done, suddenly she pulls the last of the knife out at once, I drop to the floor in relief and in pain. I lay on the ground silent, she has pulled her heart, her love away from me. She pockets the knife of her love, storing it away for another day when might assail me once more, I hope, or possibly use her devilish weapon against another. I lay in my own blood, loveless, lifeless, motionless, I am stained.

The first 6 hours I spent jumping down the neck of a bottle of scotch almost in pleasure but mildly afraid that I might not hear from her that night. Watching television with the air conditioner on full blast as the air blew recklessly around my single room studio apartment. The ice in my glass would not melt before my next drink, stumbling and incoherent I lay on my couch staring down onto my phone watching for the backlight on the display to come alive. I stare forever it seems but nothing comes of it. Dejected and terribly inebriated I fall into a drunken sleep that would only be interrupted by the air conditioner making some awful screeching sound before grinding to a stop and smoke rising from its burned out motor. I poured another glass of scotch downed it one fell swoop and returned to my slumber.

I wake up halfway expecting to feel her arm draped over my chest as she lay sleeping peacefully, eyes closed tight, hair resting on the soft features of her face. Instead I wake in a pool of my own sweat, I am dripping, I smell of scotch and body odor and even though I see some of her things laying around on the coffee table I can't sense her presence, her energy is gone. So now I am done hoping that my phone starts ringing begin to get a little angry. Why should I feel so guilty, I did as much as I could. I was always there, I loved unconditionally, I worked just as hard as she did in this relationship. I stay angry lighting cigarette after cigarette, drawing in the smooth layers of smoke and letting them sit in my lungs, commiserate for a while and then exhale sharply. After about 3/4 of a pack of cigarettes I resign my anger and sit there staring at her hair tie on the coffee table, longing for her to come back home.