Her presence is superfluous and your demeanor is vindictive, and you can’t hold her close enough to pass the hours with any more trivialities. Your allusions to Eos mean nothing to her comfortably deaf ears. Her smile drips with poisonous innocence and she’s reaching for you, and oh no, you’re doubled over again, and she’s rubbing your back, and you’re clutching at your insides and you just want to hurl them at the wall and redefine expressionism. Transgressions displayed in a mason jar atop the fireplace mantel, like the ashes of some dead relative who stopped mattering when the estate paid out and your dad blew it all at the casino again. With a knock and a bump, the skeletons come tumbling out of your closet; their bones crumble into dust on your carpet. You've lost track of how often this happens but you think the carpet looks better grey anyway, and she’s still looking up at you. Those eyes so much like a child, riddled with naivety and wonderment, like you’re the perfect picture of Eden. It’s 5am and you can’t see the room through the smoke, and she can’t hear the cries for help over her utopian illusion of This Is All We Need. You were never one for cathexis and you hope she can’t see the blood on the walls, or the blood(lust) on your hands. She has the uncanny ability to not know, despite your nuances. She’ll never read into your mind the way she reads the words you carve into the trees and the sand and the snow. Every articulation of Truth is just refracted through her pretty little head and sent spinning into the abyss. The sun is rising and you wish she’d leave, but your shift in weight and your sideways glance is subjective to her and she promises to stay. So instead you make bets with yourself over whether your body falling from a 30 story building, or the rising sun, will reach the horizon line first.