Tell-Me-To

Every evening, I watch you leave the house in a rush, the rubber tires screeching as they tug at the pavement. It isn’t until three or four in the morning that you finally return, with the whites of your eyes all bloody and sick and the doors slamming shut behind you. I have to wonder how I ever let you do anything so dangerous. It isn’t for the kids and it isn’t for the money, so I suppose it’s just the way some things go. And I suppose I don’t love you enough to make you stop. But then again, if hearts were just machines that kept running and running forever, you would have never laid on that hospital bed in the first place, hooked up to all of those awful computers.

“It’s not my fault”, you’d say. “Besides, I’d rather be dead than cut back on sugar and salt.”

So I just have to watch you get weaker and weaker and closer and closer to death because that is what I signed up for. But I am scared and I am tired and I am broken. And your mouth, wet and sticky on my body, isn’t enough to fix anything anymore. Because when you come home before the sun rises, your pupils are just dark enough that in them I can see everything we would never get the chance to feel. And if it wasn’t for the children and your weak heart and a fear of big cities, you would’ve married some simple, unreachable girl with impossibly pretty eyes like you always said you wanted. But that is not what you signed up for.