The drive home

I am a subconscious driver.

I drive by your car. It has a distictive spot in my mind's parking lot. I feel as though I have had an out of body experience. Who's car am I driving?

I have to tell myself to go down a level when I see it. Don't park in eyesight.

It is usually ridiculously late when I realize that I have taken the wrong highway to get home and that I am headed to our place, I mean your place, instead of my place. And the frozen dinners in the trunk or only for me.

There are a lot of things that used to be ours. It's not so much that I miss them. I just miss sharing them.

I feel guilty when I go to the park and I don't take you. I wake up sometimes and it's 1:20 and I worry that I missed your call, again. I get up to pace the streets looking for you, worrying you will think I don't care for your safety.

Sometimes I pace the streets anyway. No place to go home to except a freezer box of cardboard boxes.

After I left you I sat in my sister's apartment and accidentally knocked a glass of water over. I jumped up. I was terror stricken. "I will fix it." I rushed to the kitchen, ran back paper towels streaming behind me. I sopped it up, not caring for my own driness, kneeling in water and glass. When I stood up I realized it was something in me that had broken.

My sister sensed it too. She told me everything would be all right. It was only water.

I am human, a creature of habit. When I locked myself out of my car. I thought you might help. I walked to your house. As I reached the steps I saw that you sat with your new, better friends. Through the new wood blinds I saw the warm glow of the living room. The big plush furniture. The dogs, our dogs, your dogs sleeping by all of you all's feet. I turned on my heel, popped my collar, hunched my shoulders forwards and went to an acquaintance's house and slept on the porch.

When I woke I counted jumbo jets. Tracing the same route by number as the flight just before them. They would follow the fading exhaust of a copy of themselves.

I realized at some point that you had done incalcuable damage to me. I dont think it was intentional, fully. It is like smoking. I can't really blame the cigarette. It didn't mean to kill me. I had a choice. Once.

But as I sat and cried in my new lover's car yesterday I wished I had never met you. There are so many things to be unlearned. So many habits to break. It hurts the people around me as they watch me struggle with this addiction. I hurt the people I love with secret associations. I stash pieces of you deep in my psyche. There is this thing in that compartment. This road that leads to that place. This spot that is only for you.

Damn you for your piss and vinegar love.

Damn me for my puppy dog consciousness.