The Alpha and I

Bon Iver – Blood Bank (Live)

“This is for services rendered.” He tells me pushing a chocolate coin into my hand. I flip it between my fingers.

“A chocolate whore. The best kind.”

The night is a haze and my eyes are puffy. It’s coming to a head, lately. All the things left unsaid. He disappears from my bed leaving a warm imprint beside me. I try to fall back asleep. I try to silence my mind, drift into that dark oblivion that beckons kindly, an old friend.

When the peace slips out of my fingers again I open my eyes and blink into blindness, set the chocolate on my bookshelf, gulp down emotions like bile in the back of my throat. I remember the coins an old love tossed to me in a different bed, years ago. The joke that never gets funny, no matter how many times you hear it, or in how many different ways. The Madonna.

Dissect me, spread. Take these organs, still throbbing, save them labelled in jars. Preserve me; embalmed.

Transplant what still has miles in it. I will live a dozen different lives, beating, breathing, pumping in strangers’ bodies. Warming them like these words that I bleed into the silence.

It’s Valentine’s Eve. I follow myself through bars, dancing wildly. A ghost haunting my own footsteps, hovering, reaching out to brush the hair out of my own eyes. I want to collect myself, a broken bird flailing. I want to mend my wings with tape and throw me back to the sky. Learn to fly again.

I don’t want to be the sparrow that falls down chimneys. I don’t want to starve, panicked in a dark box, beating myself against metal. Making a tomb of this wood stove. Begging for someone to find me and open the door.

The men that smell my fear, sense my hesitation, and circle sniffing.

This heart that could so easily be yours, if you wanted it. If you just reached out and claimed it for your own.

The Alpha and I.