Rustings

The days are a blur, running into one another like a watercolor painting with too much water.
Colors to canvas to liquid cognizance running endlessly.
Drip, drip, drip goes the thorazine caffeine.
The sun seems perpetually asleep as I find myself sitting across from him every night at the diner.
Buried under research hypotheses and court cases as the clock finds itself flirting with three am once again.
It's a frenzy of youth, and I save the best part of the day for last.
And at three-thirty in the afternoon.
Maybe it's the romanticized idea of rusted anodynes exposing flakes of emotional joints
Exposing those wretched things I had long since buried beneath the wake of my old life.

It's just sex. It's just sex. It's just sex.
Rehearsing the mantra over and over again hoping that the third or fourth or fifty-fourth time I would believe it.
Pulling me in close to his body at the end.
Hand on his chest as he lays there with his eyes closed
Feeling the warmth and muscle of his chest under my hand.
Eyes closed.
Shifting only to kiss my forehead.
Believing that I don't care just in case he doesn't as much as me.
Just in case I want to become further attached.
Spread this alabaster rib caged heart wide.
Smother the embers beginning to glow in my chest.

I wanted to talk to you about my apathy.
Watching the seasons pass from my window.
Wishing I was bone and metal softness.
Growing skin over these impasses
of petal sharp granite.

Anodyne rustings. 

I spend many a minute-hour trying to hold on to this.

Then trying to remind myself that if I'm accepted into my masters program I will be moving an hour and a half away. 

And neither of us can manage to stay faithful.
We would break it off before that because we know.
Or we just won't want to do the distance after spending every moment we aren't in class or I'm at work together. 

The things we presuppose.

It's more than just physicality and yet it's simply that.
Or the gains in recovered pieces marked by nakedness.
I couldn't feel for long while and it seemed that my body was separate from my mind.

I had rusted.
Resigned to that thing living we all remark on with a sigh.
The separation spread to my relationships, if that's what you could call them.
On autopilot playing Juliet, that's how he described me.
I denied it because I had found something good, something more mature, even if it was only mine for a moment.

Tomorrow I put on my elegant yet business like dress.
Slip on heels with made up face and hair.
Splash on smiles and don the charisma that is so natural to me.
I'll pretend I don't still struggle with my eating disorder.
That my sexual abuse is a thing of the past.
That my mother's frequent suicidal thoughts as a result of her PTSD from my father doesn't concern me.
That the fact that my father doesn't really support my education or really anything I did in my life or the fact that he hints at thinking I'm ungrateful and like my mother doesn't even cause me to turn my head in contemplation of looking back.
Healthy.
Tomorrow I make my case for why I am a fantastic candidate for the counseling program at this school.
I'm nervous.
A bundle of nerve and hope.

Cleaning off this rust.