I wear my hair curly,
tight spirals that lay on my neck.

I wear my makeup dark, intimidating,
keeps the mystery that I’m so terrifying with a sweet glaze,
like honey.

But I don’t dissolve well and I came from poison.

I like my drinks colds, tingly, intoxicating.
It was the way my father handled his problems.
The way I handled mine,
I like my death cold, perspirating with teases that the next shot can be my last if I let it. I never really let it, I just allowed it to crawl in bed with me and sing me to sleep.

I’m attempting to romanticize a habit that dragged me a couple miles away from sanity, left me to dry up in the arid desert, surrounded by merciless voices.

I want to pour glitter on an addiction that gave me paranoia that I would rot in my bed, tied down by the idea that I can only be loved if I am bare.
Open, hands sprawled and not folded in prayer, because when I confessed beneath the altar, I leaked toxins that I swam in.

Wet dreams became a phrase that shook my ribcage, the grim reaper was the boyfriend in my head that mentored the shadows with a sweet malibu fantasy.  
Keep playing the same song, and I soon memorized each lyric.

I like my drinks on demand, I like them rolled in fury, drenched in sorrows, a control less kind of romance that undressed me every night, alone.

Control yourself, it whispered to me, you still need some for tomorrow.
I need to escape, covered in glitter and malibu kisses.

-C.M. Aldecoa