I was enraged and fuming, from the inside out. Anger was seeping through my pores like the cheap vodka only undergrad students drink. I smelled of regret and reeked of turmoil. The ends of my brown hair had started to curl from the sweat on my shoulders. My chest rose up and down slowly as if my breath was trying to tell a secret in a whisper not even God could hear. My cheek was pressed against his skin where his beard once was and freshly cut. I would have kissed him but I couldn’t stand to look at him.

Quadir wrapped his arms around me tightly like he thought my soul was trying to escape from my bones. He wasn’t letting me go but he was making it impossible to stay. He was cloaked with the scent of her. I could see her footprints in his skin and hear her laugh vibrate from the inside of his skull. She was haunting me and all I could do was cry. He defined her as a mistake but she was much more than that. She was a drunken night that I couldn’t sober up from. I was inebriated with the betrayal, puking from the foreign visitor and there wasn’t a sign of healing for miles.

I wanted to melt in his arms, turn myself into the shadows of his apartment where the light once was. My joy, my biggest ally, the man that I had been with for six and a half years had burned our house down. He shoved the knife of betrayal deep and turned the cold steel into my flesh. He had cut me to my core. His arms, which I once considered my wings, felt like barbed wire. I was trapped in the purgatory of loving him anyway. His chestnut eyes had the type of depth you could drown in and indeed, he had taken my breath away. When I looked at him, I saw him and her, not us anymore. He had done this to me. Of all people, me…and I was his rib. My tears were not enough to baptize him into any kind of repentance and forgiveness had been too grand a project for me to take on so I prayed. In the nook of his collarbone, I left a prayer on his shoulder blade.

Dear God, Buddha and all of your constituents, I have never seen a more handsome sinner. Give me the will to leave or at minimum, the strength to stay.

Tassika Lloyd
pitched entry