Go The Distance

you were a lot of fun
on a tiny screen

i liked thinking about you leaving the house
a couple of oceans away
walking in weatherbeaten shoes to the discount
liquor store
and drinking your lunch from a bottle
with german writing on the paper label
peeling it nervously away halfway down
in the park and sticking it to a bench
for a child to find
and puzzle out the foreign letters

i liked it a lot
until i woke up at two a.m. damp with sweat, feeling ill
when it was nine a.m. and you were hungover
retching german wine into the stained porcelain
and i was an ocean away
trying to sleep

and you didn’t text back
because you were seeing the bathroom floor on a slant
with your cheek on the cold tile
and your phone was sliding down the precipice between reality and
fantasy and out of sight
and so was i

falling out of bed and to the floor
thinking wow
wow
he does this
a lot
doesn’t he

i wonder what his liver looks like
under a microscope
i hope i never find out

before slipping into blackness and waking up
hours later
with my arms wrapped round the cold porcelain staring into the watery abyss
reeling

and wondering why i was hungover
when i hadn’t had a drink
since graduation

Ingrid Jensen is a contributor at Please Kill Me and at Totally Wired Magazine. Her fiction, essays and poems have been published by the Westchester Review, The Showbear Family Circus, and New South StoryLab as well as at the magazines where she is a contributor. She is 20 years old.