I can still taste your flesh on mine, as if my pores soaked in all of your pheromones and stored them in safekeeping for nights like this, nights when whiskey becomes the only sleeping medicine powerful enough to soothe my troubled mind.
The memories come in broken patterns, like a film strip played on a rusty wheel, or like the thrifted records we would buy in the dozens - scratched and dusty, but still recognizable.
A kiss. A hit. An I-love-you. A shudder. They were all the same at this point.
I didn't know who else to go to but my mother.
My speech was slurred, elisions that made my words condense into one. Still, she understood. She had been here before.
She told me that days would turn into weeks, and before I knew it those weeks would shift to months, years, eternities within themselves.
I told her I didn't like the prospects of this.
She told me it would be okay, that all I had to do was follow in her footsteps.
I found the bread crumbs easily.
Jack Daniels was the only witness I had as I pulled the trigger
and I smiled in spite of the fact that until tonight, I had never believed in ghosts.