There's blood on my cuffs when I shake myself upright. Catch wanderer-eyes watching from across the bar, holding on to me like they've strayed too far from home and now can't remember the way back. Only, I've never been good at finding homes, only breaking them apart. I lift my hand to my mirror self, press the other into my jean pocket, feel the pulse of my young flesh naive under the layers. Alive. Am I, still?
October smells like a memory I thought I'd forgotten, and I shimmy down the line towards strange eyes, then give 'em the slip. I can't break another one, the callouses on my palms will crack, my lips couldn't take it. I flit past a promise, skip ahead to the finish line. Leave another poor, lost man to pay my tab.
Out at night, when I should be home. A-sleeping. Listen. But there's far too many cries distorting the cold-laden air. I should make my way home while I still remember having one. Force my key in the lock, only he won't open it for me now. Gone and changed the locks in my absence. The bastard. Open up, you dog. I growl. On the other side, hear a broken-heart man's raggedy breathing. Him, the only one I told about the blood and the rags, the froth at the old hag's mouth while she watches me sleeping. Him, the only one I cut and run countless times, only to retrieve one another on the doorstep. Finding our silence against one another, bleeding shoulders, missing kin.
But not this time. I've searched too long, have stretched my heels into clown-shoes. Embarrassed all who've loved me. Now, I'm left without a home, Tentative, desperate yet desirous, telling myself still we can begin again, I knock.
And there's nothing. Not the memory of what I've lost, not a whispered I'm sorry. Not even an envelope-slip under the door stuffed to the brim with all my things. The pictures I hung up and the lips I pressed above the doorway to keep him safe while I'm away. The truth is, I'm gone too often. I owe him my wings to hide under, not just my prayers. This stranger who looks at me like he's made of the same plasma.
Barefoot in the corridor, I say please, but there's only the echo and the smell of the trash-chute, clogged yet again, to resonate back my shameful vibrato. I love you, I try, but my life's gotten tired of my own second-best, so it's kicking me out to the curb.
I've always known that, if my soul had a choice, it would choose him. Not I.
I've fucked up too much. Passed too many mailboxes with foreign names. Sold my own too cheap and now I'm left a vagabond. It's what I deserve. To lose everything, so I stop and dust myself before I've had time to fall to the dirt. Caught on the edge of my sleeve, still, the lisp of another heart I've squandered. To come or gone-by already? Soundless, too late even for the nosiness of groundkeepers, I exit my past-promise building.
Make my way into the night. A vagrant, still, between two different lives.
Been a minute since I done that. I wouldn't say this freewrite started from something specifically. The title came from this song, and parts of the story are, I suppose, about the "you" in the song. Bits and pieces are inspired by a flash piece I wrote years ago. A couple, really. Back then, I played a mirror write-up on both sides of the door. A him and a her. An entreaty. Now, it's just on the outside trying to crawl in. And it's lonely and it's scared, and it wants its story told. So here I am, telling it.
