Of course, there are distinct disadvantages to surviving a scandal:
You lose your friends.          
You lose your trust.
You lost all credibility in what you dearly love.

You begin an intimate, five-day relationship, seducing a slick-barreled gun that sings your name.

But after a while, you unwrap your lips from around the gun. You grab your pen. And you write. Because when it's all said and done, that is what you do.

Write.

I have been held between calloused fingers with
courage caked under the fingernails.

I've watched the tribe of white knuckled girls with the knobby knees
fall off the jungle gym.

Their mothers would sit on the park bench and smoke Virginia Slims.

Must be getting old, the way their skinny fingers combed the better half
of their crinkly silver hair.

They get carried away out there, how they invite themselves into strangers cars, fire up another cig and tell their stories to each other.

And the kids are wild and all footwork, thinned lips the color of roses, questioning whatever confuses them.

I am uncomfortable with their softness, mumbling syllables or whispering fairy tales.
They picked scabs until they bled and their mothers pretended not to notice as they soaked in late night stands and whiskey;
I want to say to the girls on the jungle gym, “you were born to a mother who wore pain like
trees wear their rings, as marks of bravery and battle cries.”

But because I am forever bonded to this earth, I will feed myself with their
feminine giggles carried by the wind

And for now, I will carve myself down to nothing more than water                                                                   and remember that
observation really is a lonely science.

"you tore my chest open to borrow happiness,

and i'm afraid you forgot to give it back."

my friend, he had a camera and he used it against cancer

it was better than any therapy

but in the end, nothing ever survives

When he finally asks what’s wrong, tell him that he’s really just too good for you and you're afraid that one day he’ll wake up and realize that he could sleep with so many better women.
When he leaves the apartment and gets in the back of a taxi cab at two in the morning, don't follow him.
Maybe even though you saw him with another woman, laughing and joking in a smoky bar with their heads held close together, you still think you have a shot with him.
You don’t.

Dress yourself up if for no other reason than making yourself feel good. Put on your tightest, tiniest little black dress and some high heels and have a dance party in your own room with the stereo blasting.
Throw away his photos. Delete his texts, crumple up his notes and slot them into the paper shredder like old credit cards.
Thinking about him is dangerous; do not lie in bed in a quivering heap for days at a time. Do not mope or hit the snooze button simply so you can drift off to sleep and dream about him.
Jump in the shower and wash him out of your hair. Scrub your skin raw until you cannot smell him anymore. Wash your sheets. As you take them out of the dryer, practice saying your first and last name with adding his on.

Wreck your journal. This is the required “fresh start” your best friend told you about on New Years. She is tough and practical. Consider being more like her. Decide against it because having an affair with your husbands best friend is not practical.
Let your thoughts flow into questions that you pose to the world. Tell yourself that this is not an unfortunate habit.
Remind yourself that today in the modern world, if you’re single, that doesn't mean you’re missing “your other half.”  There isn't someone else out there running around with two arms and two legs and one head who used to be attached to one side of your body and will eventually find you again, on the street or in a deli or even at an indie rock concert in the back row; there’s just you. An imperfectly perfect human being who likes coffee or maybe hates it and has said awful, regrettable things to somebody else and is still trying to figure out how this whole life thing works.

When you are on the couch of your living room, do not reach out to squeeze the faces in the smoke you blow; do not think of his face. Reach out and draw the lines in your mothers face. She would have wanted you to.

i told my doctor that  
i've had thoughts of suicide

i told him that sometimes
i press the flesh of my palms against my windpipe
and try to force the good things out of my ***** lungs

i asked him
after the years of erosion,
will my face still be my own?

he said, no
so i clasped my hands around my neck
to keep from breathing

this air that doesn't belong to me
this air i do not deserve
this air that will never be my own

She found two packs of cigarettes hidden between binders in his backpack, and his ashtray full of cigarette butts. The cabinets were empty and the sink was full of dishes.

Her heart dries out, cracks. She can't cry out. She wants him to hold her the way he used to.

It won't stop raining. The city tries to overpower the sound of the kitchen clock ticking, but the paper walls and cellophane doors seem to amplify the incense of mother natures smoke still lingering in the air.

Chain-smoking cigarettes like a machine, he doesn't spare her a glance. There were bombs going off inside her chest, her ever-dormant chest, and she wonders if he's noticed yet. And she still hopes her words send telegrams to the farthest corners of his admiration.

She wants to be the cigarette that is ever present in his slim fine hands, and the smoke that fills, coils in his lungs.

Now whiskey goes down like fire,

and they went down

like buildings.