Kyle

You told me on the balcony barefoot, sipping bad wine, that you never wanted kids. I lied and said the wine was fine. That was enough reason to leave, but I stayed. Hopelessly optimistic is sometimes safer than the 14 foot drop down the railing that I considered, staring at the sliver of some yellow moon.

It was the kind of sex in the dark that felt good, but I couldn’t picture what your face looked like when you were breathing in my neck. I was thinking about how my body looked, what slice of my skin you were looking at. I was thinking about how my hair looked – messy and frizzy and tangled and I didn’t have a hair tie on my wrist.

You had blue, blue eyes that I didn’t notice until you told me they were blue. I didn’t feel like going swimming in them. Your body didn’t fit the way I thought it would – we were not two lost pieces connecting in the sheets. I couldn’t even smell you. Like you were some placeholder my senses refused to even remember.

So when the inevitable end came, I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t rattled. I didn’t lose my appetite. I sat on the couch in the sun and cried – for the kind of girl I wished I could be. Careless, slutty, and unfeeling. It was a little too hopeless romantic of me to assume the first date in a long time would turn into anything but mud.

I got so worried if you even liked me that I forgot I didn’t like you. I didn’t like you at all.

Shanna Williams lives in San Francisco, CA. She likes wearing rings and over-easy eggs and lying to people. Her recent publications include Slipstream Press, trouble maker fire starter magazine, and Weasel Press.