All The Ways You Left Me

You’ve left me again, probably for good this time. Maybe you’ll come back, and then maybe you’ll leave again. But whether you were far or near, you were always leaving me, right from the start.

When you found me, you left me. You left me, like an unflushed turd, in the bathroom where we first made love – the doorless stall in the back of that rancid little Tiki bar near the interstate. You didn’t call, you didn’t wipe. You just left me there in that bowl, floating around its black and voided nexus, waiting to be sucked into your emotional drain.

“Thanks for the blumpkin.”

Keep your blumpkin, John. Take it with you, rather. Take it as you leave.

Wasn’t that your idea of love anyways, John? Your little cliché about give and take? Sure, I would always give and you would always take. The only thing you could ever give was a shit, and even then, it was only while you were taking it.

You left me like a putative father, unbound and exonerated by the contents of a weighty manila envelope, crying and laughing as you hugged Maury and danced your way off-camera. You left me there in my emotional sick, to be gawked at by an audience of every vindictive man I’ve ever met. You left me for a commercial break.

You left me like a discarded infant, placed with the teary care of an unprepared mother, atop a pile of refuse in a back-alley dumpster crib. Amid the pizza boxes and soiled diapers of children more loved, I am left alone, to eat what I can of the trash before I die of baby-exposure. Perhaps I’ll roll over onto a hepatitic needle, one that will find its way into my heart with the same clinical precision and ease that you once did, and I’ll die a whore’s death thinking about how you left me.

You left me like a conjoined twin. One of those parasitic conjoined twins that has to be removed. One that dies in the womb and never fully develops, like that poor man with an extra face on his cheek or the girl with a doll-sized corpse for a left breast. Though you left surgically, efficiently, and as a matter of medical necessity, I still felt loss when they took you away. You were my disgusting secret, but you were still my secret, something that belonged to me, individual and separate in name but a part of me nonetheless. Hidden under heavy coats and baggy shirts, your twisted face belied humanity, a cruel expression that mocked my own, and served as an implicit reminder of my incontrovertible mortality.

You left me like an infirm elderly parent, loved in theory but not in practice, stored away in a facility staffed by immigrants from war torn countries – desperately tragic places that border on the fictional, and I think Uruguay, wherever that is. You would never see me, you’d just check in, as a half-hearted formality. You’d sit there with me while I pretended to enjoy Bingo. I’d keep my anecdotes light; updates on my reading circle with Dot and Barb, no mention of the others that have died, not because I worry about scaring you, I just don’t want to see any hope in your eyes when I remind you that I won’t be here much longer.

You left me empty, like a bank account, or a text-field, waiting for input, like the password box on your email, which I am now filling in. You left me with emotional imprints, feelings both intangible and palpable, smells and sights, and memories, some of them not even my own, like the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on. You left me a utility bill with the last four digits of your credit card number jotted across the bottom. You left me no choice.

You left me with an afternoon, a bottle of Night Train, and four thousand unread messages. You left me with a yearning, spiteful motivation, and an ability to search through an inbox.

You left me for some bitch named Debra, who has like a lazy eye and what the fuck is up with this woman’s left tit? It looks like it has its own arms. She has square boobs. Are you for real? This is why you left? For some square tit bitch with an old lady name?