act one: regret
regret comes in many shapes and forms.
harsh and unforgiving, it will catch up with you,
and it will take control.
Mine, sits on the edge of my coffee table,
and looms over me, in its white, indocile glory.
It’s nothing but a coffee cup.
No prints, no design. Nothing fancy. Not even mine.
we don’t know how it ended up in our kitchen. A gift? Forgotten by a friend? Maybe.
Costs probably even less than it weighs,
but holds a lifetime worth of morning kiss stains and breakfast fight cracks.
Still, it was too insignificant for her to pack. To shove it down her suitcase and take it with her.
It’s been sitting there ever since. For seven days. Untouched. People often forget you when you keep quiet.
She’s been gone for seven days. It doesn’t feel nearly as freeing as it’s ought to.
Just as I started to feel the weight off my shoulders, I feel another one.
I feel it creeping up my shoulder blades as I eat, nesting in the nape of my neck as I sleep, drilling into my skull and feeding off of what’s inside while I work.
It’s the cup.
Never have I ever been a believer,
but I do believe god gave it eyes, the cup,
just as he would to a living thing.
as insane as I might sound, I firmly believe
that if there is a god, he deemed me unworthy of my senses and gave them to the cup.
It’s there. With eyes to burn into my back. To judge.
Don’t worry, no, I’m fine.
It’s just that I haven’t done much living lately. Not that I haven’t tried.
It's near impossible to move on with life when you feel exposed. to an omniscient, all present creature.
It feels like bringing someone’s sick voyeur dreams to life.
Perhaps that’s why the concept of an all-knowing God has never appealed to me.
I can’t get my mind on a new hobby,
Or my lips on a new neck, my hands around a new waist.
Cause I know when I look up,
It will still be there,
And it will stare.
And through its cold, ceramic eyes,
She will stare.
My every step is wrong,
my every breath is foul, just because it says so.
Like I said,
life becomes unlivable when someone is watching. Don’t know how men of God do it.
See, there is nothing I can do about it.
I can’t pick it up, take it to the kitchen,
pour the now week-old coffee down the drain,
shove it in a cupboard, and never think about it again.
Lord, I can barely look at it.
I avoid it the way you do a bad memory. An unwanted child, an impulsive purchase you regret.
A witness to a private moment.
Maybe because it was there, an accidental confidante,
To what we shared with no one but each other.
To when her hands first held mine.
When certain words stumbled down our lips,
The first time she sighed and ran her hands through my hair,
And it was here, exactly where it is now,
When she spat in my face
and told me to never show it around her again.
To so much of our firsts and our lasts.
Would I sound insane if I said,
That sometimes I want to ask it
Yes, the cup,
Whether it was still watching that night.
That night, seven days ago,
When she left her phone on the table
For me to see her in the words, the poems, the arms of another.
Foreign. Not me.
She’s been foreign for a while actually. For months now.
The night I knew we meant everything to me and nothing to her.
I want to ask
Would it glare at her too?
With the same resentment that it glares at me now, my every waking moment,
If I was the one who got on the plane that night
And she was the one who was left behind?
I don’t. I never do.
It’s just a coffee cup after all.
Alive. Dead. Aware. Who cares?
Is this what they call madness? Waiting for an object to open its mouth?
Pottery does not talk. Pottery breaks.
But me, myself,
I have clay in my blood. I am pottery. Every man is a vase of his own.
Thus, why am I expected not to crack?
