The Absence Was Ecstasy

The faint clink of ice on glass mocks me as I pull taut lipped from a tumbler. Through dim candlelight, I see a night of abstinence wheezing by my bedside with his throat cut. I’ll try again tomorrow. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this train for passage any longer. Its cars smell like decomposition, and derailments are increasingly frequent. Even the most innocuous questions are seen as measured attacks. “You’ve been to Niagara Falls, right?” Brakes scream on iron tracks. A conductor strangles his golden crucifix and races through the Lord’s Prayer. Brace for impact. A month has passed. There’s no internal dialogue to be had. No rocks left unturned. “You’ve been here before” skips on a turntable, subconsciously engraining itself into my cloudy mind. To my surprise, the chisel of epiphany cracks my sullen face with a sly smile. From the mirror at my feet, I see deep wrinkles surfacing in the corners of my eyes. Jovial fault lines from a different life collapse inward like battle-won scars of blissful days. “Not far now,” I remind myself. I’m dizzy. Courvoisier has sufficiently unwired the circuit board between my ears and now words are falling out of focus on the page before me as I leaf daintily through retired tree wood and count the night’s progress. Prodding for my makeshift bookmark, I lean to extinguish a tobacco and coffee-scented soy candle. In the waning luminescence, a torn Post-it note stares up at me, tattooed with the scribbles of the scorned. The Five Ghosts Two loved an idea, not a man. One was a victim of time. Another was running from herself. The last was never mine. Wincing, I choke down the flaming final tug. “To the frost.” I cough, raising my eclipse glass to a full moon. At the bedpost, a wick blushes bashfully and loses its fight. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ This relationship needs to die. She’s sidesaddling me on a love seat as the irony of inappropriate nomenclature sneers from crushed cushions. “You don’t seem happy to be home, babe.” She’s right. I fell out of this canoe three months ago. I should break up with her immediately but, instead, elect to slowly drown in the rapids, pinging off slippery river stones and dodging spawning salmon. Twenty years old and I’m already too cynical to get out of my own way. It shines through cracks in the space between us. At best, we’re contentious; at worst, we’re cold fusion. She’s my nemesis and knows it. Her deceptive mouth outlines fallacies in this area, but her poker face is full of tells. Our intercostal separation had lasted all of six months, but she talks about our fictitious glory days like megaliths doomed to be forever lost in the sands of time. For a spell, I was her favorite song, but the radio overplayed me, and before long, my I-love-yous were white noise and static. She was content channel surfing as my amplitude trended toward zero. A template for future failures. I start with alcohol; it’s short work before the wheels are off and my truck is propped on cinder blocks. I’m drinking to forget—a dangerous practice. Bloodthirsty, we volley warning shots and tracers at each other through holes in the doorframe my fist demolished the prior week. The outbursts are growing increasingly frequent, and she tells me she fears physical harm. It’s unfounded in every respect, of course. Still, it irks me to be spoken of in such a way. Admittedly, I’m taken aback, maybe even frightened. She sees me as a ravenous feral animal fighting domestication. As predominantly inaccurate as it may be, she’s struck a chord with her comment, and I fold like origami. By the week’s conclusion, I have a shrink mute my fury with a heavy dose of Klonopin. To her dismay, the psychiatrist’s tranquilizer dart ricochets off thick armored hide, failing to penetrate my leathery flesh. The beast remains untamed, indomitable again. One evening, she stirs in her sleep and awakens to me leaning out the fourth-floor window. The drapes are parted around my torso, and I can feel the night air caressing naked flesh. Panicked, she grabs me and demands an explanation. Eyeing a particularly rocky pothole below, I calmly inform her that I intend to kill myself this night. I tell her that I’m tired in a way that sleep alone can’t remedy. I’m not scared of the earth below or what happens next. Nor do I see the shattered lives of those I’d leave behind. Instead, I inspect the distant trash barrels being ravaged by rodents and plan to count the seconds until chest meets gravel. As tiny hands foil my plans, I look at her swollen weeping face and feel it—absolutely nothing. I’m truly Frankenstein’s monster.