In the morning, when she woke up, he was there.
Maybe not physically.
She couldn’t smell his after shave, the dried blood on his arms, the scent of shampoo still clinging to the back of his thin neck.
He always had such a beautiful neck.
Beautiful ears, too, though he didn’t like the gauges.
When she tried to gauge her own ears, he just laughed, and helped her clean up the mess.
He held ice cubes to her swollen ear lobes and whispered the lines from all her favorite movies into her ears, he even sang a few songs that both of them liked.
When she opened her eyes, the first thing that she did was go back to her animal instincts and sniff the air for the scents of breakfast.
A big breakfast that neither of them could ever really eat.
Which meant delicious left overs that still smelled fresh, even through the plastic wrap, and eating out on the back porch, pretending that they could taste the stars as they shot across the sky.
There was sausage, muffins, home made, of course, eggs with ketchup, and hash browns, cooked just right and a beautiful mocha color against the milky white of the plates.
Both of the plates had cracks in them, though she didn’t mind.
Raised lines where he glued them back together.
Like he did with his arms in the quiet of every early morning.
They were both broken things.
The duct tape that held each others wounds closed.
Fraying at the edges, a faint burnt smell wafting around them both, though only one of them smoked.
Even when he left for the day, there was always a good morning text message waiting for her when she awoke sometimes around noon.
She would smile, feeling the chapped skin of her lips with her tongue.
Remembering how his voice had sounded right before he left.
Rough with the thickness of sleep.
His morning voice was always so beautiful.
Everything about him was beautiful.
He was beautiful.
He smelled like dirt sometimes, the scent of nicotine still clinging to him.
And coffee.
Always coffee.
Coffee grounds, biscuits, cigarettes, burnt food, and love.
But the smell of love might have just been his cologne.
Though he always refused to tell her what it smelled like, she would hide her face in his shirt, right above his jutting collar bones, and pretend that she could see the smells making a checkerboard pattern across the faded fabric.
And then, one day, he was gone.
His clothes were still there.
The drawings on the wall, done in the middle of the night.
Bandages in the trash can in the corner of the room, behind the door so neither of them had to see it.
There was a box of cigarettes on the night stand, leaning against the bottom of the lamp like they had been waiting for her to wake up.
It wasn’t a good morning that they greeted her with, though.
What they greeted her with, was a goodbye.
I wrote this for someone I thought I was in love with, who turned out not to even exist cuz I got ******* catfished. Man, love is a *****.