playing all my cards wrong

I still feel the haunting zig-zag pattern your nails traced out along the curve of my back. My fingers itch across the keyboard as I succumb to the urge to once again type your name into Facebook’s baiting search bar. Shamefully, I sift through your profile pictures just to see how you look when you genuinely beam from ear to ear because the only smile I know is the smug smirk you give me after our tongues wrestle.

I can’t stop seeing the hazy outline of your sculpted jaw when I close my eyes. You look the best when the streetlights above you project a harsh shadow against the bridge of your perfectly-centered Grecian nose. I remember brushing my palm against the sparse stubble you missed while shaving that morning because I need to remind myself that you are human and still capable of physical flaws. You’re the modern-day doppelganger of Adonis, the romantic illustrations that accompanied my childhood bedtime stories, an artistic masterpiece on my fireplace altar that I want to show off to all my family and friends, but I know that I actually won’t because I find myself choking out a painful chuckle when your jokes constantly fall flat.

I desperately try to relive the wonder I felt when we first met — your body hunched over a fire escape as you aimed the ash from your cigarette into the stack of recycled cardboard directly below you. Yet every subsequent interaction I’ve had with you has not held up against the cinematic nostalgia that replays through my projector memory. I want you to evoke the same emotion in me that you did the first time you tickled your tongue against my ear and thanked me for coming tonight. Even a sleazy innuendo seemed so magical back then, but these days, your late night spooning makes it too warm for me to fall sleep. Your calls have become nuisances that break my familiar and comfortable daily routine,  but I stay on the phone because I like hearing the heavy breaths you take between sentences that make you sound effortlessly sexy. The actual content of your words no longer have an effect on me, so I just wait for you to get to the meat of the conversation: where will we be meeting up tonight? I am tired of you and pandering to your constant need for validation, but I am still not strong enough to return to a lonely bed.

In a few months, I won’t remember your last name and with luck, I will have forgotten your first. I won’t remember bumming a cigarette off you — a weak excuse to begin small talk even though I am repulsed by the remnant smell of smoke in my hair the next morning. I won’t remember how you took my hands, locked our fingers together, and told me we were puzzle pieces that finally found each other. I will have moved on to my next puzzle piece and you will continue to use that awful pickup line successfully on other unsuspecting women. But for now, I will enjoy your genetically-inherited features and your brawny arms that hold me in empty embraces. There is nothing left to show for our time together — just dirty sheets, wasted productivity, and expensive phone bills.