Heartbreak feels good in a city like this… especially when one can warp inspiration from a new Taylor Swift song to fit their happenstance wretchedness.
It’s 11:09 p.m. when I find my thumb hovering over our iMessages. All of them have been deleted. Twice. Thrice. I’ve restored them all. Every time. Like how I wanted my faith in you to resurrect; my longing for you to do the right thing. In light of everything that once sparkled now faded into the fog of friendship.
All I do is sit here and wonder if any of it was genuine fiction.
You put my kindness on refrigerator magnets, my patience spearing me with safety pins. Starry-eyed under city lights. Drunk on the guys who ghosted you. High on the victimhood you spun into cotton candy.
I won’t miss what we had or what we could’ve been — holding my hand with a smoking gun in the other. How you asked to take pictures of our wine glasses almost empty, the burning space inside each filled with immeasurable satire. The way I slid into your dimples behind a soundtrack of pupil-payed jazz.
All I could see in the hollow reflection was myself dying inside.
Next to a mercurial man who promised positively nothing and served only triviality. The same one I’d wonder when the game of musical chairs would stop on a three-legged stool.
It’s 11:32 p.m., and the candle on my desk struggles, the wick flickering into nonexistence. I remind myself I’ve said all I can; all I want. What I need. What you left me with.
How your cowardness was more cruel than anything else, hiding behind the veil of selfishness you wear like a crown.
You stand six inches taller, incapable of meeting my line of sight — the smallest man who ever lived in San Francisco.
If stripping my gilded spring was the goal, I can’t help but think you know what you did. Lighting my flower beds into wildfires while I lay on the cold kitchen floor. The few times I’ve ever fumbled facedown on Nob Hill.
Now that none of it’s exciting, you’ll get back on grids. Years younger. Cosplaying with pictures of an unreliable body. Balancing other gullible suitors on cobblestone roads once the front door closes.
All I could think about was whether or not that was the first lie.
Will you ever concede why you did it? After I confided tongue-tied summer jaunts and my innocence lost inside a Christmas tree farm. Before I asked why you left me alone in a wine bar on Powell Street.
You slammed my body and shattered my mind, repressing your guilt inside piano bars. In time, I’ll look back and say not a moment too soon. Because you are what you did. I’ll forgive, but never forget how you were gone by the morning. And you are what you didn’t.
All I hope is that this finds its way to the smallest man who ever lived in San Francisco.
