No Worries

I sit at the bar alone, sipping steadily on my beverage and savoring the moment with only one little voice in my ear. I spent hours today nursing people through their bad days, their bad weeks, their broken hearts. I check my phone again, no calls.

In a flash, I see a blade.

Smiling coyly at Brendan and not even having to flirt with Carlos, I try to patch the feeling I have like a last-ditch effort on fraying old jeans. I stroke her hair and empathize. I do. It isn't a lie. "I saw him with another girl, beautiful, blonde." Hands laced affectionately. I tell her we have poor taste. These guys, they leave us because they are flawed, don't want even what they really want. I promise there is not something wrong with us, it isn't our fault. I don't even believe myself. A weak pink lense over a painful pattern.

In a flash, without any movement, I am open, peeled back in so clean a motion I don't even seen it, I just see me, blood-red flower, pulsing away.

The worst part is that this is how I breathe more deeply. I feel now like this has given me an extra place to touch oxygen. There is the fizzy sensation of heat and chill clashing with one another and my eyes feast on it, the only thing that I can focus on, figure out.

Brendan tells me a holiday joke. His arms splayed to the left and right of his torso, a line across his shoulders, he says, "What's this?"

Dunno.

"A crappy way to spend Easter."