Baby Jesus can have my last pint

You were going for Christmas.1

Family gatherings, promotions, some shit like that.2

But we both knew where you were going, or rather, where you weren't. You knew by the sheer weight of your baggage, too heavy for just a month of merry fun under mistletoes, plum puddings, and electronic angels. By how you had wrapped your sandles up carefully in the butchered Kroger's bag you brought back from the store. By how you didn't pack. Stuff. You know, that stuff. Stuff I bought you, a woolly scarf, a blank journal, a Hello Kitty toothbrush. Our stuff.3

I knew by the tragedy in your eyes.4

I swear to baby Jesus that this is going to be my last glass of alcohol as I dip my tongue into the glass. I groan in contented misery as the hotspicyhurtful, bottled and commercialized, given as gifts by landlords because I've got such a pretty face liquor floods my arteries, seeps into my capillaries, bites into the gray velvet of my brain. I feel my eyes sting and simmer and brew in their sockets and blame it on the huge metropolitan Christmas tree that is staring back at me all fractured and blinking and plastic through the crystal of my glass.5

Yeah, I swear to baby bloody Jesus that I'll just have one more drink. One more hotspicyhurtful to sizzle in the gap between my stomach and my heart like fireworks in rain. One more blindingcorrosiveburning to drown the acidic stains of your face from the back of my eyelids. One more weepingsaltybitter to wash away the discrete mumble of your farewell, jumbled between my mess of sobbing and begging and.6

I love yous.7

You wrote to me that day in your chicken-scrawled handwriting on maybe tear-stained but probably grease-stained stationary. It sounded just like you were here, whispering violin-whined logic with your probably well-ravaged by now tongue.8

Said you weren't coming back.9

Said you wanted to be just friends.10

Said.11

It's the twelfth time I've sworn to baby Jesus when I notice that there are words between the lines of your twisted letters.12

Said you loved me.13

Said you wanted to see me.14

Said.15

Stuff.16

You know, stuff that.17

I always wished you'd say.18

I lose count after swearing to baby Jesus, now two thousand years plus one day old, seventeen times, but it doesn't matter now, because I'm too busy choking out all my oaths to stuff more heretical promises in. And it doesn't matter now, because I don't have anymore blasphemy to fill my twisted and contracting stomach with. And it doesn't matter now because I woke up this morning, head swimming with the echo of angelic delusions and alcoholism, to the scent of ink on the carpet. And your letter that.19

Said you weren't coming back.20

Said you wanted to be just friends.21

And.22

That's all it.23

Said.24