Call me love.
Call me baby.
It’s a drug that stays in the system; after the high, after the fall.
You wake up in the ER dazed and calling out for the thing that put you there. What’s that about?
Shoot me with a needle, swallow all the pills, and it won’t change anything. I will still want you.
Correction: I will still want the idea of you. Soft words in dirty sheets and pet names that should have meant something.
There’s a path of memory that only leads the one way, and, at its end, I can still hear a whisper at my neck.
Go again, love?
I’ll follow a trail of breadcrumbs straight to a witch’s pot at the memory of those soft lies.
Honey, I said I would, didn’t I?
You did. You said everything and nothing. Everything and nothing, punctuated with baby and edited into a seductive soundtrack.
It isn’t the lies I miss. Truly. It’s that illusion of safety in the words.
There, baby, right there.
Today, I bought groceries, and I took the kids to school. I managed to slip out of a cold bed without hitting snooze. I went to work.
Nobody called me baby. I survived it.
Barely.
Copyright 2018 Jolie Mason/ jmasonbooks. Share this:
