Refugee

He found his story in an addiction that melted him down and a lesson in the substitute for love when he was running so fast his feet stood still: horizontal on the floorboards, painful pleasures that jaded the Grand Design.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.

He knew that but proposed anyway because the city never let him sleep and on the inside the season never changes.

In the back of his mind there's another girl, a girl that turned him from the inside, out, a person that melted him down and welted him up and jerked his eyes from in to out from up to down but he would never venture there. Too real when everything was real to him because the force of her make-believe encased him and he couldn't accept change like that. (He grew up a long time ago, the kind of growing and going where you can't go back. And there's no use in glancing in the latter direction.)

So he looked the other way. She was tall, and pale, and no-bull-shit, like him. An excellent chef. There was always a good dish to come home to, and his pillar, the girl who let him forget a little while that he couldn't do poetry anymore--so much that it all came back and poetry wasn't it. It was a course load, a new path, physiology and cosmotology somehow mixing together in his mind until it went blank again.

The other girl showed up sometimes at night and he woke up sweating, listening to the plumbing dripping loudly on the porcelain sink because the landlord didn't give a damn.

Mornings were all like Easter Sunday--lazy until the bells rang around 10 a.m. Breezy. Then cut to the chase. Jesus resurrected. It wasn't a big deal to him: he resurrected people all the time and prevented them from needing it. Religion didn't float his boat if it wasn't the Kama Sutra.

It was the mantra tattooed in blood-red across the inside of his forehead.

God didn't do that to him and he knew He never would. The boy did that shit to himself.

He might've believed it until the floor above him caved in from a minor radiator leak and asphyxiated his mattress out of commission, and his faith in what little he had left of it all.

The girl screamed bloody murder when the cat bit the dust too soon from the poison laced with the thrown-out tuna that was really meant for the rats.

This city is a farce, he thought. And the ring is too big on her finger.

Those are the times the other one slips in and he punches the wall to release that unidentifiable monster that rises up like a wave in him. He pushes the identity down beneath him because he knows its name and the truth about what he is.

That addiction's a distraction and he knows it.

Because he's resurrected millions and prevented them from needing it. His saving was his desensitization and if he could only get it back, he'd take all of it in any form, if only just for a moment. But he couldn't, so he took the next best thing. It erased him from himself for a little while, erased the other girl, too, and the inferiority complex that made him shy away.

But fucking never taught him how to feel.