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Dumb and Wide photo

I guess when you said we could have sex over Christmas break I expected more than just sex, or expected the sex we used to have, years back, when I was skinny and you were sweeter. But I felt sluiced and silly this time: swigging vodka and sprite and halving the watermelon edible for us with a plastic Best Western coffee spoon, watching myself through your glassed-up eel green gaze—hard enough to leave fingerprints on—fumbling my emoted unfolding under the lemon peel phosphor coated fluorescents. Me, all scatter-shotted words I tried out in the air and punted at you (hoping you’d play along) but that you let fall as inutile and top-heavy as my bigger-now body felt. I guess I thought you wouldn’t care about this rapid accretion of weight. About the hair I’d shed down dreamed-out depression drains. The brain that now felt as chittering brittle as Judie Garland’s Golden Age Ozian green glass. Months before, I’d told you about my brain over deep-night Twitter DMs and you’d said sorry, nothing, t y p i n g, silence. Now, you only nodded at the comforter’s coquelicot colors, California King, resisting my eyes, but I knew you could hear the blush in my voice. I changed the subject while we ate the respective halves of our edible and I thought about the monumental fucking beauty of the Spanish moss outside the two story window, alone in all that midnight; of the absurd red river, dumb and wide as my hope.
 


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