Roses

Roses

         He looks at her with steely eyes that she used to write poems about, pages and pages about their iron chill and their narrowness when he smiled. They sit together in a drafty coffee shop with a pair of vanilla cappuccinos between them and she barely feels the burn of the mug under her fingertips when he looks at her. It’s one of the reasons her poems warped to focus only on how cold that gray can be. She wants to pull out those lines and let them speak for her now, but she was never brave, she dropped things often, and can only wish that she had the same cool, unthinking poise as the girls in the romance novels she read. But if she did, she wouldn’t be sitting straight-backed in an overstuffed armchair with the boyfriend she’d known for three years, wondering how to talk without stuttering and tell him she was finally done, that they were over for the fourth time since last January, that she wouldn’t listen when he cried and told her that he would die without her and he would do better next time, that he promises he’ll try so hard next time, really. She would tell him that a part of her is dying by not killing off what needs to be killed.

         If she was a romance heroine then he would be the perfect man he thought he was, or Prince Charming would have rescued her a long time ago. She has to tell him there will be no next time, but she opens her mouth only to have him beat her to the words so she never has the chance to speak. He sounds silky and smooth and sorry, exactly how she wants to be. The thing that was dying inside her gives a beat, a single assurance that it’s still alive. He makes her fall with those words, makes her weak, and now she can’t remember why she was going to tell him she needed to leave him to save herself. When he holds her, it hurts good. It’s the reason why he gave her roses. Pleasure and pain. Long stemmed, short lived.