You promised to take me to the park but you never came.
This morning at 4am the sun still hadn’t come out yet and I was looking at a spread of tarot cards. I flipped one from the deck – ten of swords. The card face shows a man face-down in the grass ten swords stabbed through his back. I shuddered.
What if the ghosts come for me?
Years later this might be one of those “ha-ha” stories, one of those we look back upon and think it’s oh-so-funny because of the cruel workings of fate. Or not, because I know I’ll never see you again and that it was your own cruelty that caused it all. You’re sick and manipulative and I don’t know what the hell goes on through your mind and yesterday you told me you loved me and you’ll take me to the park in the morning but you never came.
And I won’t say that I die without you by my side, but goddammit did I think that you were the one. Last night we made so much love there wasn’t any left in the world, not for the orphaned children, not for the lambs slaughtered at daybreak, not for the dying and deceased. You told me you loved me and you’d take me to the park tomorrow and then you took off the cross you always wear around your neck and went to the bathroom. I lay down in bed, content, unaware that you’d never come back.
The cross sat on my dresser for a long time, glimmering like the sun under the lamplight, but I must remind myself, I must remind myself, all that glitters is not gold. I took it up in my hands, kissed it, and fell asleep. In the morning it had fallen under the bed, perhaps, but I could not find it anymore, and neither could I find you.
I waited around for hours. What did you mean by “morning?” This morning? The next morning? The morning after that? The morning you’d finally tell me for a second time that –?
But you didn’t come back, not even for the cross you kept so dedicatedly around your neck. When night finally fell upon my shoulders I sat alone on my bed and the ghosts wrapped their arms around me in one large ectoplasmic huddle.
You looked a bit cold, they tell me.
I smile. Thanks, I say.
We stayed huddled the entire night.
Years from now I will earn the courage to call you up and beat you down. I will say to your face that your cruelty never did anyone any good, look at you now old decrepit and lonely and I’m still as gleaming as I was from day one. I’ll tell you that I was deluded into loving you, and that yes, I fell into all kinds of deep holes, but I’m kind and kindness gets you people to extend their hands in times of need. And hell, I survived, fuck you, I survived.
Years from now I will stand up for me and face the music. But for now I stare at the forlorn phone hoping for the strength to move my arms but I can’t.
