lowest of the low

He will never fathom the ache of walking away, though my feet have worn the path smooth. Once I liked him—never loved—yet he was the first to find me at my lowest tide, a drowned girl, salt in her hair. He speaks in blanks, a man without vowels, unable to make a sentence of care. He cannot grow. He has confessed himself beneath the standard like a rusted coin, dull in the palm.

He is the only man I know who refuses to rise, who will not touch the sky of responsibility, who lets his heart fester in a locked chest. A slave to his own hunger, all pulse and no soul. Like the rest of them—yes, the rest, those men who sing the same chorus, he wants to turn the blame on me when the air sours, when the sweetness spoils.

Outside the hotel, he leaves my hands orphaned, as if daylight were a crime, but inside Room 405 he clutches me like a secret, a thing pressed between pages. His intimacy is a windowless room. His silence is a moth beating at my throat.