To Hell

I broke and sent you a message.

Sitting in the parking lot, waiting to play guitar and listening to songs I used to listen to. I was finishing the flask from the glove compartment and rehearsal was in your old building. I took breaths. I took swallows. I took my time. The evening was settling in and I was the sunset then. I was the fade and the dim and I was the end.

"Everyone I know lives in your old building. I hate it."

Send.

A song I used to sing came on and I turned most of the car off, just letting the stereo play. 

Phone buzzes. The long vibration when it's you. I listen to the song a little more. I can see the younger me. Singing. Smiling. Wandering. The younger me. Drunk in that building. Bleeding out of my face and smiling and the music is loud and you're patching me up and my mother calls. I tell her I cut my face open and you tell her I didn't and that I am exaggerating and that you are taking care of me. 

"I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

I finish the flask and throw it back in the glove compartment.

Fuck you and your sorry. I'm fine. Look at me. Fine. People keep saying I look the best I have in years. No one thinks this is a nosedive. No one thinks I'm drunk and choking in a parking lot at dusk. No one thinks about me at all because I am fine. Look at me. Goddamn fine.

 "Yeah. Just weird. Sorry."

Send.

The CD ends and starts over and I eject  it and look at my guitar. It has a long crack in it now and one of the tuning pegs is broken off because two months ago I kicked the fucking thing over and out of the room when I couldn't play the songs I wanted to write about you. I still can't, so now I write songs about me, and songs about melting snow and changing weather and nothing that means a goddamned thing, I guess. 

A long vibration and my eyes sting and soon it will be too dark for my sunglasses and soon it will be time to rehearse and soon it will be time to crawl back home and lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and listen to the wind careen through the back porch where I thought years ago that I would put a bistro table. I would put chairs there and eat breakfast and you would wake up and look out the back window and I'd be eating toast and drinking coffee and the sun would be in my hair and life and nothing would eat at me. Nothing would weigh on me. Nothing would ever be wrong. Soon it will be time to lie in the dark. Not sleeping, not dreaming.

"I know. Literally everything reminds me of you. So, yeah... I'm sorry."

Stop saying you are sorry. I don't want sorry. I don't want you to feel apologetic or to think of me at all. I don't want to have sent you a message. I don't want to go inside the fucking building. I don't want to leave the car. I don't want to breathe.

I don't respond. 

Put my sunglasses in the center console. Open the door. Take my guitar with the long crack and broken tuning peg. I need to do these things. I need to do things. Keep moving. Walking, singing, playing. Writing. Keep going.

I don't know what my fucking problem is. Tomorrow will be different. I won't even know you.

I won't even know you and I will eat toast on the back porch and drink coffee and play guitar and to hell with you. 

To hell with you.

I step inside the building. To hell.