By Brittney Uecker
You seem so much kinder than before when you say that you missed me, that you’ll message me, or you’ll try at least — you haven’t paid your phone bill in months — and before I walk away, you ask if I want a hug and I say I do, so you wrap me up in all six feet of you, and later, when you do message me, I go to the creek where we first made out and proceed to get drunk — bottle-of-wine, go-to-McDonalds, tweet-about-God-drunk — and I decide I need to see you, I will see you, so I call three times and you don’t answer, so I drive to your place anyway and don’t knock, just take a sharp boozy breath and open the door and thank God you are alone, sprawled out and sleepy on the couch just like I want you to be, and that’s where it starts to get hazy and I remember just flashes, like when we go outside to smoke and talk about TV and you tell me my hair looks weird when I try to flip it, so I remind you that you missed me and your laugh is nervous and not reassuring, but you ask me if I want to lay down and I follow you to your room where miraculously, you have an air mattress, next to the massive pile of all your possessions, and miraculously, you have condoms, and all I can think about is that you’ve fucked other girls since the last time, so I fuck you ravenously, like it’s slipping away, and your hair feels thicker in my hands when you tell me I’m too loud and I tell you to get behind me and afterward, we dress unceremoniously and go back out for another smoke, where the sun has set and the mosquitos are rabid, where I scratch angry, bleeding welts into my legs as you tell me your roommates will be home soon so I have to leave and I ask you for five more minutes so I can revel in the heat of your thigh against mine, revel in how impossible and destructive I can be, how when given an inch, I will violently take a mile, how I still think you’re kind and how I am so so sad.
Brittney Uecker is a librarian and writer living in rural Montana and collecting tattoos and not reducing her caffeine intake at all, nope, not one bit.