She got what was coming for not going

I had a mouth full of mistakes that I was going to drop over our conversation like a sad and reckless payload, landing wherever they may. Maybe it was a mark of who I am or maybe it was just gender patterns that I thought in war metaphors a lot of the time, but at any rate it didn’t much help me being drunk and more than a little bitter.

I thought the central problem of the human condition is everybody gets raised all fucking wrong, one way or another. I thought it while I sat on the bathroom tile leaning against the tub with her standing over me, I thought we’re all miserable, we all hurt and hurt and hurt, which I meant that as transitive and intransitive both. It was a goddamn reflex for me to say what I was about to say, and then all the things that eventually came after, like what was I but one of those sea anemones, if those are the ones that just react to the current all the time and jerk their tendrils in at the sign of danger. I’m no zoologist.

But let’s watch this how it played out through the way my brain saw everything as growing constantly like an optical illusion and my words slurred a little and I stopped mid-sentence to consider if I was or was not saying something I wanted to say. I didn’t look at her face was all, I was brave enough to say the stupid thing but not enough to see what it did. I didn’t see the way her concern for me that had held fast all the way home from the party, through the half-conscious singing of songs that weren’t on the radio and pulling her hair by mistake, I didn’t see that become a deep and shriveling pain when I said the only reason anybody would talk about your paintings is because you look like a go-to-the-back-bedroom-and-give-a-blowjob kind of girl, so don’t expect that guy to actually call his gallery friend. And then I was in the bathroom alone, head lolled back on a loose neck thinking about what it would feel like to throw up my whole vocabulary and never speak again.