Anguish

I was too busy dancing to let the pain wash over. I was too busy being sexy to let anything else pierce through. Moved my body, let the rhythm roll through me, watched the eyes watch me, a flame to their moth. I was liquid, a heartache, a bellyache of too much sugar and alcohol, a drain to their fun. But I was beautiful, so they let me dance anyway.

Black on black, glittery, sparkly, so pretty and swaying with my movements. A buck of the hips, a pout to my lips, and already they were gone on me.

Lips pressed, kissed, loved, tongues and teeth and a hand down the front of my pants. Yes, I'm ready, yes, I'm hurt, yes you can stroke me until the pain is gone, I won't mind. I need it.

So he's in my mind's eye, laughing and being beautiful, just how I remember him. The tongue in my mouth isn't his, and that's all that matters. Isn't him, will never be him. As I'm alive and hot here in the thousandth man's embrace, he is cold and rotting, and I cannot change the circumstances.

So when the tears come to my eyes later in the night, against the rough brick in the alleyway, when I come not of my own volition, and his name is on my lips-- well, I pretend it never existed, I pretend it never was. I lose and fall, on my knees, dirty and weak, and pretend I really am the pretty boy they want me to be.

And when I go home, back to the place we shared, I become real again.

I claw, and shred, and fight. The material of my shirt disintegrates in my white-knuckled hands, my mouth screwing up into a horrendous expression as I cry and scream uncontrollably. My body jerks as if I am having a seizure, the constant cry of 'no, no, no, no' tearing from my mouth bloodily. My knees are sore on the bathroom tile, my pants bloodied and scraped. I don't feel any of it. I can't, I don't know how.

"I hate you!" My scream is ragged, guttural. "I hate you so fucking much! Why did you leave me?!" My throat is becoming raw, voice straining with the utter fury inside my chest. I heave, almost throwing up, now screaming wordlessly as my fists pound the floor, blood thick as it's slung around me. My knuckles are ruined, my arms corded with the force, the bone peeking through and becoming shattered. Pain never once registers up my arms, the nerve endings becoming numb with the impact. He was gone, and now, finally, so am I.

The next morning I wake with my face pressed to the tile. The blood is brown, in splatters around me, and my hands are indistinguishable. And he remains in the ground, and there is still nothing I can do about it.