[I learned the hard way that the people nearby are not, in fact, mind readers. He says I’m in love with you, and I regurgitate in the name of good humor, though I thought it first, truly. He cheekily tells his girl that she has bad taste in men, and I smile alone and think, I beg to differ. And they both cried while I hid the traces of my own weak heart and irises. I called them pu**ies. They grinned with me, eventually. Just five minutes ago, after-wards, they looked fine. Ephemeral weary sadness like winter wind: It bites at my bitter cheeks and stings my quivering knees. He is the ultimate I love you whore. I am the ultimate masochist. And I hate him, I hate him and all the world at the tip of my red-inked pen hates him too, for mocking me, for making a mockery of me and my shoes and my time; for being an unintentionally cruel punk, and for being so wonderfully kind. Oh, his girl is absolutely beautiful. He loves me a dozen ways, and not one of them compares.]

And when the night ends I bid him farewell in the spot where the yellow flicker of the streetlights and streetlamps are momentarily embedded in his blue irises, and the soft-looking scarf around his neck defends her lingering marks like a cotton shield. Hang me to dry, too much in the sun, with the rope ‘round his collar bone. The moon is out in its glorious stead, the night’s sharp chill holding us hostage, and I want nothing more than to tug him in for a kiss. An ordinary goodbye later and the car door shuts solidly beside me and my friend, he disappears in the short mirror, the words ‘objects are closer than they appear’ masked over his moving silhouette like a eulogy, a false caption on an aging photograph that is far too pretty to be real.