Soliloquies to the Self

Face to face
Touching feet
Forced nonchalance
When we meet

Fights for play
Midnight calls
Bodies brushing
In the halls

Laughing fits
Just kiss me please
You're so close
And out of reach

The driver

Was drunk. He'll swear he wasn't but he knows he was.

My mutually magnetic platonic partnership. Assured: I was too high maintenance, modest, moody for him to want me that way.

Yet he'd wake me in the middle of night prompted by the coercive properties of intoxication with confessions of hopeless desire and chivalrous encouragement to pursue his friends if he couldn't have me.

"I will never fuck you", I told him a final time; my planned playful warning undercut by an unanticipated firmness that reverberated through the suddenly still air, contaminated by an awkwardness that couldn't be withdrawn.

His defensive retort was swift, incoherent, yet strategically painful, a dull ache of the heart that persisted long after he lost his train of thought on the road ahead of us.

We made up later that night and he never tried it again.

He went after my best friend, and left me to pick up the pieces of her he left behind.


The silent shot-gun

Is now in social exile.

I saw the hidden loneliness and longing for companionship he tried to mask with an apparent newly-minted bravado - the second-guessing uncertainty of which was a tell-tale giveaway of his hopes of transformation.

I picked you. I was kind to you. Because you seemed like somebody who needed the compassion you were so intent on dealing out.

I chalked it up to you just needing a friend.

You could have been a great friend.

Instead you chose to be the living embodiment of nice guy with ulterior motives - who eventually proved to be worse than the fuckboys you berated me for giving the time of day.

"She's not that kind of girl."

But apparently, I was.

If all you ever wanted was to see me undressed, why pretend to be a gentleman?


The back seat comforter

Stroked my hair as I held back tears during the driver's muddled tirade.

He skilfully responded to diversions regarding direction while delivering repetitive yet appreciated assurances that it's okay and he doesn't mean it.

Last month you decided to tell me about all the girls you slept with.

Today you tried to stroke my hair again and I stepped away.

You deviated from your usual routine of walking me back and left early.

Please don't be like the others.