This morning
I woke up
and
told Melissa we wouldn’t
make it past three months.

We're at month two,
and I can feel it.

Either I’d drop her, or she’d
drop me, but either way
“we don’t have staying power,
and there’s no point
in either of us
pretending like we’re grown ups
who can just power through things
out of sheer complacency”.

I wasn’t looking at her.
Just up
at the spackle and a spinning fan.

It’s so hot in here,
that we sleep on top of the covers
sweating little puddles of skin
into the comforter.

Nightly,
we mash those deposits of dried salt
deep into the mattress
with our sloughing bodies
to get stuck
and form
tiny caves of skin and boredom in the springs.

She rolled away from me
swirling off a cloud
of stale, watermelon shampoo
And reached
With a tightly domed deltoid
towards the blue milk crate
where her purse sat.

She rummaged in there,
her back muscles working
like a landslide of flesh.

She finally dropped the purse,
after an effort of five minutes,
and I heard the successful flick
of a lighter.

She started
puffing and chugging down smoke
As she laid on her side.

My eyes watered
in the bluish smog,
and as the fan turned
raining down peices of our own skin
in a dusty, undetectable cloud of particulates
I could just see her,
out of the corner of my eye,
Shifting the weight of her body
from her deltoid
to her trapezius.