I Will Drink My Scotch And Fail At Love And Lie On My Couch In Darkness

I will come home from work, remove my shoes then socks, then throw my keys “somewhere” in hopes of losing them and never leaving my condominium again. I will imagine the world-at-large as a prison, and my condominium as the sole small courtyard on which a free man such as myself may walk in tight circles, metaphorically, of course; for I am now at my drinking station — an IKEA “FÖRHÖJA” kitchen cart rendered from fallen birch, somewhere, as I imagine, in a ravaged forest in Sweden — observing Lagavulin 16-year single malt Islay Scotch finding the inner contour of a Riedel snifter, its caramel-y brown notes smiling in the diminishing rays of a slanted sun grasping the walls downward as daylight ends.

I will check my phone for a text, only to see the conventional array of apps, as tiny tumors, or ennui pills. I will turn my head towards the wall hosting that last shard of daylight, and imagine your fingers — the same ones I carried, always want to, in my hands as some small animal — not typing a non-existent text, and how not doing something can be so meaningful. How dense absence can be felt. Your fingers are ten maniacs doing everything but texting me. I will stare at my phone, its blue glow in competition with the yellow day that dies a little each time the earth clicks away from the sun as some shunned cosmic lover.

I will check for everything, myself my own private investigator searching for clues on how I came to feel this way, which you critiqued was “emo,” a word whose mere vernacular could not stand the fight against the painted lips through which such a word came. “Emo,” I say, to the tiny counter-clockwise whirlpool of Lagavulin inside a snifter whose fingerprints may be the only proof I am here. I will check my Twitter for retweets, my Facebook for likes, my blog for reblogs, various blogs for comments, or the liking of comments. I will check my email, my phone, my prostate, but never my mirror. I will not simply swallow my scotch, but let it waterfall around both sides of my tongue, into the moat of my lower jaw, whose swollen vessels are half-anesthetized by an island far away. I will check my phone one more time, and consider it as a single object in space, a dense population of atoms whose potential velocity towards the floor would not be appreciated the next morning.

I will lie on my couch as an overgrown excised abortion, barely tepid, some endangered species of hairless monkey seeking a return to the amazon of your hair, whose natural color is still under debate — and under debate is fine, for now, but under covers, in bed, is where my limbs may find their phantom ones lost so long ago in you. And yes this is emo. I will play Philip Glass’s solo piano on loop, such that the repetitive tracks and their repetitive notes collapse linear time into a large wobbly circle, which you comment makes you dizzy, there in bed, and I would twist your Joan of Arc flamed red hair into a bun around my fist from behind your head as you concede, finally, with a mouth pulled open that it was dyed. And that night messengers would burn.

I will see you lying on the floor in your room, in a dark blue dress wearing heels for no reason, your hair both propped and flattened by the hardwood floors as a kind of sideways model who didn’t feel like standing any longer. This beautiful city will offer its pinkish late afternoon light through three bay windows, and I will be inexplicably Monk happy you are simply “there,” that you exist so far, and so near, as distance — consumed by demarcations, angry black lines — is petty; though when collapsed by a kiss, deserves an elegy. This is where you stand up and let the flame lower onto your shoulders, bangs perhaps shielding your own thoughts. You can continue to dye and I may die. May this be our agreement. May I craft such scenes in my head, on my $700 dollar somewhat-douchey black probably faux-leather couch, the cold glow of my phone before it goes to sleep impersonating the moon in its loyal conveyance of a brighter star.