Stripped

I may not remember the majority of the night, but I sure as hell remember your deafening silence. I don’t blame you – really – there was simply nothing left to say.  There we were, standing on opposite ends of the “plaza”, as it was called, our group of shit-faced so-called friends filling the gap between us, and a heavily tattooed twenty-something girl who may have once been pretty doing upside-down splits on the pole in front of us.

Everything, which was now nothing, was out in the open, splayed on stage with everyone watching, their eyes wide and unblinking. Dogs.  Our love, stripped down to its core.  Bare, white, exposed, alone.  Cold under the lights, shaking in its nakedness, with no arms left to wrap around it, no hand to stroke its hollowed cheek and tell it everything would be okay.

It was a stranger, dancing for tips between us.  It smiled at me – viciously, spitefully.  It crawled to you, parting its lips, close enough for you to feel its ragged, empty breath.  Averting our eyes would mean looking at each other.  And so we stared, sensing the other’s desperate desire for ignorance in our peripherals.

Oh my once-darling love, how? How did fate bring us here? Such a dirty, tasteless end to something that I had once compared to a star.

Last call, last drink, last dance.

I could have sworn I felt it brush past me as I stood outside the club, waiting for my drunken company to collect themselves.  I turned, and watched it wrap its long, dark coat around its worn out body and walk away from us, head down, defeated, into the yellow-lit streets, damp with a fresh late-November snow.