The room smells of coffee and cigarettes
That easily forgotten scent
(Call it 'the usual' at the midnight bar)
An insidious fantasy in the greasy eight foot by two kitchenette
A chair hardly holds its own weight
But every golden morning
On smoky speckled granite
There rests a newspaper and its partner
The ink gel pen
Buried beneath calloused palms
Ready to tackle the morning sudoku

My eyes don't quite greet yours
As I barely grasp the cereal cupboard
Hoping for the nine hundredth time
You won't notice
The failure in my short stature
Yet you rise
Like the plume of death
That snarky grin on stubbled skin
Imprinted by age and time
And with osseous fingers
Reach for that easy handle
To pour me
My early meal

I've considered waking up earlier
Avoid the apocalyptic ritual of mornings
Perhaps early enough to travel back
To the womb
Faultless and timeless
Before mother was 19 and you were 29
Learning to love
Just each other before adding
Another
Would I find myself?
A parasite
One that should be deleted
Before gifted the brutality
Of that first
Fated breath

We moved into a different rhythm
I haven't said "I love you"
Since I was fourteen
Not sincerely at least
And my room is my sanctuary
Lest I need to speak
To a parent
Turned stranger
Envy encircles my heart
For friends who speak to their founders
Like I speak to dated sepia memories
I'm speechless at how
People know of their children's lives at all
So used to enduring in silence
I forgot
Others speak
Without the curtains of time
Mutilating love

Shatter the plastic bricks of this childhood
Lego house
And one might recognise
The imperfections of emotional abuse
Hallways thirty miles long
Between rooms
For it is normal to traverse oceans and cities and islands
For a simple conversation-
Is it not?
Two separate households
Under one precarious rooftop
Burned out galaxies
Trying nuclear fusion once more
To engender hydrogen from nothing
Like arguments
Spawned from
Thin air

This old family of mine
My mother
My father and
I
We live dangerously close to the edge
Like flying fish too close to the waterfall
Rose-tinted glasses disguise
The misery
For adolescent naivety
Smudged and raw eyes concealed
For the rest of the world
By jaded untruths

This fleeting family of mine:
Here is my soul
(My house key)
My salvation
(My bedroom)
And my sanctity
(The roommates agreement)
For the last time before

I say goodbye

i want to see a future
where i don't hate myself

for the choices i don't make
but instead love myself

for the opportunities i
rise from challenges

"maybe were all a simulation" my friend pondered between the puffs of smoke. i dont know how she did it. make wisps of grey weave around her calloused fingers in the dead of night, but behind her mask, maybe she didnt either.

"how do you know" i heard my lips move and the cogs of my mind click-clock tick-tock into place. "because we search for the answer to 'what is life' but we arent programmed to know" my head nodded but i was already away and outside the claustrophobic room. the scratchy heat licked my back and the moon sung high in the sky. in between the smoke, she looked up with old wise eyes and regarded me so heavily her being ****** looked sober.

then she turned away with a dignified huff and the inhalation of more grey.

endless grey.

somewhere between my programmer and this game im choking on her thoughts in ten-forty-two pm summer scratchy heat in the claustrophobic room that is so familiar it must be mine. the mattress so worn and walls so torn we seem pristine next to my room. almost...perfect.

but maybe this is why we are all a simulation. to prove that life's 1s and 0s aren't set in stone and that i can always choke. on her grey. on the heat. on the way city life is just a game within a game when you look through a separate set of eyes.

but between the grey and the heat, i forget to close my eyes