The Afterlife of the Party

It was the time of night when bad things

always happen. Cancelling plans was in vogue.

My hair stuck to my cheeks, and I was homesick

for winter. We were wearing the same outfits

we always wore on nights like this. There were

brimming cups of potions that changed us

into the people we had been hoping to become.

It’s likely I will have been a few people by the time

I’m dead, and I don’t know if I will have liked any of them

particularly well. My drink was sizzling down my throat

like a firework. This is the moment everyone was talking about,

this is why I wanted to be a grown up. You were disappearing

as you folded into your mind, and I was right behind you.

The vodka in your veins was leaking onto my hips

when you danced against me. I would’ve followed you

into hell. Your breath was replacing all of the words

you didn’t know how to say. I was trying to find them,

to place you in my poems and understand everything

you’d been too afraid to admit sober. I was peeling you open

and scooping out the seeds. I wanted to know what it felt like

to be that hollow, but I was afraid I already did. We were all

so human. I could taste the vomit stains on the carpet.

The empty bottles, the artifacts of our past lives. I thought

about all the people in the room and all the homes

I could not imagine them filling. Where do we all go?

How do we all fit? We were born into a world of lack.

We were not enough, yearning to be anywhere

but the present. Feelings are fleeting, but the future

is forever. I had this awful tendency of being myself.

Through all the clanking glasses and the static on the speakers,

I could not slip away from the now. So inescapably

me. The blurry photos and the honking traffic, tomorrow

we’d be left with only the aftertaste of the feeling.

The universe was ripping itself out from under you

as you fell into my apartment. Did you catch the words

I was stumbling over? Our story is in the details. I forgot

to close my windows at night, my life seeping into the city

through the screen. It was somewhere between the streetlight

cutting through my bedroom window and the endless curve

of your spine that the high took hold. We were in for the long run.