We Were Never Meant To Be Saved

At first, he felt like a song

leaking through the walls of a basement club—

guitar feedback, bad speakers, spilled beer,

and a singer screaming into the microphone

with blood on his knuckles

like he meant every word.

We met beneath a dying red light.

I wore rhinestones on my eyelids,

fringe around my hips,

and enough confidence

to light a cigarette with.

One of my boots was splitting at the toe.

Old gum stuck to the heel.

Somebody’s cigarette ash

was melting into my hair.

At the exact moment

I needed it most,

he pulled a laugh out of me

I had been keeping behind my teeth,

reckless enough to make me hate him later.

The ugly kind of laugh—

lipstick ruined, mascara sweating,

a little spit catching at the corner of my lips,

the kind that made nearby strangers turn around.

He had green eyes

too vivid for a place like that,

like two exit signs glowing underwater.

One of his front teeth was chipped,

and his smile kept catching on it.

His blonde hair fell into his face

in dirty, careless pieces.

He wore a leather jacket

that smelled of rain, smoke, and old skin.

His hands were bruised at the joints,

as if his fists had been arguing

with the world before I met him.

For a while, we were beautiful trouble.

We ate cold fries from a paper basket

that had gone soft with grease.

Sat in the back of a car

that smelled like wet denim, gasoline,

and somebody else’s sadness.

Beneath flickering gas-station lights,

we talked about leaving this town

like it had stolen something from us.

Maybe it had.

He touched my wrist beneath the table

like I was something worth keeping.

I believed him.

That is the part I cannot forgive.

Not him.

Me.

For believing that someone

who made my blood forget

it was ever meant to stay still,

who made my body forget

it had been surviving,

would know how to carry

the softest thing I own.

That was the dangerous part.

Not loving him.

Not kissing him.

Being believed

when I said I was fine.

Talking to him felt easy.

We talked about music, bad parents, stupid teachers, impossible futures,

and all the little machines the world built

to wear us down.

I let him see the apartment—

the stained carpet,

the dead plant still standing in the window.

I let him see me crying over nothing,

or everything,

with my face swollen

and a tissue stuck to my cheek.

He said I was beautiful.

I gave him pieces of myself

the way a person gives away matches—

one at a time,

not realizing how dark

the room around me might become.

Then one of them went out.

No slammed door.

No final song.

Just silence slipping beneath the bathroom stall,

cold and patient as a Midwestern winter.

His messages grew thin.

His excuses lost their rhythm.

Then the screen held only my reflection.

I kept checking my phone

while the band played loud enough

to shake dust from the ceiling.

Everyone else was dancing.

I was standing beneath the red lights,

waiting for a ghost

to remember my name,

waiting for the world

to explain itself,

waiting for him

to come up behind me,

wrap his arms around my waist,

cigarette burning between his lips,

ash falling into my hair.

Nobody came.

I thought I heard my name.

I thought I heard his.

People call it ghosting

like it is some harmless little trick—

like a person can vanish

without leaving their fingerprints

on your throat.

But his absence followed me home.

Giving the wound a name never made it less real.

It slept beside me.

Sat in the passenger seat.

Stared back from every mirror

where I tried to look untouchable.

I could paint my eyes black.

Pull on my boots.

Walk into the night

like I owned every broken street.

Still, the hurt caught the light

whenever I moved.

People asked what happened.

I tried to explain that someone had left without leaving—

that I was grieving

a body that was still walking somewhere

beneath the same sky.

They looked at me

like I had given the wrong answer.

I cried in the bathroom with the fan running

so nobody would hear me making

those wet, animal sounds.

I hate that he gets to become a memory

while I became the room

after everyone had stopped screaming.

I refused to make his silence sacred.

Still, every room I entered

seemed to be missing one wall.

Maybe this was all love ever was:

a door left open in winter,

a light burning for someone

who had already decided not to return.

He left.

I stayed.

And one day,

I will drag this ache through an amplifier

until even the dead streets hear it.

But after the rhinestones came off,

I could still feel their sharp little ghosts

against my eyelids.