I am the blazing fire of resentment, a needle scraping across the grooves, a strong wind pulling a kite with a frayed string. 

Before we arrived here, we smoked opium together. Hardly romantic, she sat on the toilet and I leaned against the bathroom wall and you could hardly hear the bubbling of the cheap plastic water pipe through all the noise of the party as we burned our coveted score away. 

That’s the end of it, she tells me, places the pipe down in the bathtub, reaches for her cigarettes. Outside, thunder, and the building shakes a little. I stare at my reflection in the mirror. I investigate my teeth. My mouth is dry, I can still taste the alkaloids, and I feel like I’ve got tar underneath my fingernails. It appears as if the flowers on the wallpaper are spiraling around in circles, but I know that it's all imagination, running reckless. 

I need to talk to you... later. I need to tell you something, she says, between indulgent drags off a menthol cigarette that crackles as it burns to the filter. And I push her words to the side, like so many stupid magazines that I can wait to read later, all piling up and cluttering the waiting room tables in my mind, because, you know, everything is cool. Everything feels good. So I kiss her, and she bites my lip, and I taste a little bit of blood, and she mumbles an apology. It doesn't matter, she doesn't hurt me. 

It won't be long before we're somewhere else, a universe away from here, but for now, I’m content to trace lines with my fingertips across the curves of her skin while all the seemingly forgettable music hooks itself irrevocably into the back catalogues of my brain, where it will wait, like a snare, to tear at my heels whenever I try to run.

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