In The Bed of a Two A.M. Lover

wake up drowning in sticky sheets that are yours, chest coated with drying sweat that isn’t, breathing stale cigarettes and spilled Smirnoff and rolling onto your side over broken condom wrappers once buried in your wallet with lint balls and spearmint gum and the worn edges of family photos, the hurt that shouldn’t be yours but is because you’re broken and that’s what broken people do, is hurt, weighing down your aching body heavier than the hot air beading sweat across your temples, the kind of heat that sinks into sheets—sheets the two a.m. lover from the bar tugged thoughtlessly towards their side of the bed after they’d explored the unfurled map of once uncharted trails and valleys and mountains that are your body and reached the treasure and sailed away with it all, making you wish you’d walked the plank instead; the kind of heat that eats away at your skin like disease, the kind that wouldn’t be there if two a.m. lover hadn’t rented your body for the night while your sense honeymooned until daylight, if two a.m. lover hadn’t forgotten to shut the window or at least said goodbye or left a note or made that one lovely boy or girl that you can never shake out of your head or your heart—the one you dreamed of again while lying limp across two a.m. lover’s body under a swinging fluorescent lightbulb—fall in love with you, or if two a.m. lover had helped you forget them forever and ever and ever or at least held you when you cried into your pillow or fixed the ravine in your chest or found the cure for cancer when they slipped silent from your bed, out from under covers while you were dead to the world and lying naked, vulnerable in your own home—in your own skin—lost within the confines of the cornflower blue walls of your room, your sanity, that you painted alone two years ago and can see glistening in the melting sun like they’re about to slide into puddles on the floor alongside the tears that burn in your eyes like falling stars, because strangers don’t like playing with broken things for long.