In the mornings, I wake with your limbs snaked around my mind even when you are not here. I brush through the clumps of unhappy strands that drop off my head telling me its time to go then I lace my shoes.
These street corners, I whip through them like they are imaginary. The ghost town of my heart is populated even less densely than these desolate cement trails. A stray cat, a dozen yellow tulip blooms blinking in an empty yard, this is my only company. A solitary parade of 1 is how I always start. I don't feel much, just tiredness sprinkled with apathy. Part of me wants to lie down in the nearest yard, like a large, spandexed starfish. Maybe the sprinklers will come on and drown my body in the shallow green grass.
Everyone has their drug of choice. I don't drink, smoke, or wrap mine in rubber; I run. Away, away, away. I run.
At a restaurant, you once told me that it was my capability to thirst endlessly for life that drew you to me. I know that by now, you must have already examined the irony, that it was that same 'thirst' that drove me away from you in the end. You thought it was my constant need to do new things, try everything once, explore. You tried to understand, you pleaded with me, took me to a foreign country, and to a place where I could fall out of the sky. You misunderstood. It is not a thirst for more, simply an itch to push the accelerator down, to wander. It is my inexhaustible need to leave things behind, shed them as I go. Everything in the past that holds too hard, chafes too deep, or has knots, I have left.
I am the most skilled escapist you will meet, though it pains me to say it. I don't dream of visiting beautiful palaces, swimming in tepid rivers on sunny days, or eating spicy exotic foods. I just dream of getting out of this warm bed, where your limbs on my thighs have become too much like familiar shackles. Even though I have lain here, my mind has already outrun your embrace. Forgive me when you wake up. I will be not more than a speck on the horizon, and a few strands left on the pillow.
