The Afterlife of the PartyA Story by alexalikeswordsIt 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. © 2017 alexalikeswords |
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