I’m on your bed right now. You’re playing some niche game— your latest obsession. The room smells like toast. You’re heating up frozen pizza, but all I can smell is the crust burning. We’re still young— your sheets haven’t been washed since you moved in two months ago. Your pillow is yellow, suspiciously so, but you’ve bought a new one for me, whiter than this middle-class paint job wall. My black hair dye has already stained it gray.
I don’t write about my current relationship, only exes and un-lovers that never were, but our relationship is a menopause— I don’t even talk to you about my period— and you are beautiful as you ever were when you pause before you tell me you missed me.
We bloomed on a Thursday night, the night before my math finals. It’s 4am, and you are holding my hand. The silence is palpable, like the fog in a beaten down car in the abandoned parking lot by University Plaza. I pick on your callus. We watch a movie. Miles Morales falls from the train in the sky, and your hands are sweating.
Night after our first fight, I’m in your bed. My back turned away from you. You trace my spine with your fingertips. I feel disgusting. You tell me about your past, and your humanness makes me want to retch. You’re a hole in my life, god-shaped and bellowing, until you’re not.
You’re tiny and shivering, and the ceiling is towering. You’re beautiful against the sun, hideous under halogen. But I am obsessive and despicable, and I stalk your LinkedIn profile and find your gaming usernames. I find your teenage YouTube account, your high school track records, and I’m crazy, to the cliche. I won’t whisper I love you when I’m under you. I’ll close my eyes and cling to your warmth. It’s too chilly here.
Do you know it’s almost impossible to push out of a closed refrigerator? A boy died inside. It was on the news, I was terrified for my life, even if I had never even considered going inside. In retrospect it was a great hiding spot, especially in the summer, especially when my skin flared in the heat, redness a plague down my nape, down my prepubescent body.
When it crept down my tailbone, my mom had taken me to the hospital, and the doctor makes me strip behind white curtains, and I feel like a prostitute, like I am not twelve, with a rash adoring my spine, widening across my training bra.
So you hold me, and I am inside the refrigerator. It’s a great hiding spot, and you’ll never find me here, because you know people have died inside, and I’m an adult now, why would I hide inside one. Your fingers walk up my spine, and I’m a jailbait, at eighteen, and you pull open the white curtains like a TV host to discover my writhing body like an endangered animal at an illegal auction.
I tell you I miss you. You make fun of me. It’s barely been a day. But it feels even colder today.