3:17

Saul relaxed naked beside me in rumpled sheets. Cigarette smoke swirled up to a stained white-washed ceiling as lights from passing cars created moving patterns of phantoms. Phantoms who laughed at us.

2:30am and you asked me why I’m so paranoid all the time. And I looked at you and you reminded me of an Indian headdress. You’re not scared, sweetheart. Your fears ride the wind but the feathers stay.

2:32am and you commanded I write about you. There was India ink on the nightstand and a safety pin on your pillowcase and I spent the next eight minutes marking you with the proximate vocabulary of how I wanted you.

2:40am and you couldn’t sleep. We’d spent the last three hours crushing the sleeping pills into ash and blew it into soda bottles of apple-flavored cola but you said it still tasted of resigned escapism.

2:41am and time was a bag of bones which dragged itself over cracked asphalt. It took too long even though we’re not waiting for anything - but we’re the liars in room 318 because you’re waiting for the forest and I’m waiting for you to get out of it.

3:00am and I’m reading. You gently grabbed my hands and nonchalantly traced the folds in my fingers where the rhymes hide. I’d been trying to put it on hold, telling you I’d lost them.

3:17 and it’s just another night threatening to tear at the seams to reveal a morning I can’t will into life being easier for you.

Neither of us had much luck with relationships. He a hooligan of the street mired in crime, drugs and prostitution to scratch out a meager existence. Seven long years I’d spent in an on-again, off-again with the same shitbag, the same abusive scum. I would kill simply to be “on” with anyone at all. Two lonely losers lost in a night of unrelenting sadness and paranoia. At least for now, we had each other…