He has left, once again. The nausea hits her and it’s not the booze. It crawls up from the darkest corners of her hollowed body, fighting against the flow of her own organs. A stomach-churning warmth that starts in the womb, passes beneath the bruised skin of her breasts, explodes like a bubble in her cigarette-dried mouth. The debris of that invisible detonation floats on the orbital surface of eyes aflame with tiredness, filled with memories that seem to belong to an eternity ago. Standing still at the edge of the bed in room 116, she lets her tears evaporate in the lilac light of dawn. What are those quicksands she feels at the tips of her toes, sucking her down into the floor? Again, that feeling of being immobilised. Oh, to disappear along with all that sickness that haunts every image of him!
She can feel her blood pulse harder, as if trying to escape her own vessels, while her gaze, locked on the void, evokes the impression of their two pupils aligning. His gaze had been fixed somewhere below, on her own source of pleasure rather than her persona. But to speak frankly, it hardly mattered that he hadn’t come to bed with her in the same spirit.

He has left, once again. The beginning of another day. She could still picture him again in that room painted in blue. She gives shape to the image of a feeling through the traces he has left lingering in the air. The walls still echo with that scent of oud and tobacco that would always bring her to her knees, and with the sound of his two thin chain necklaces clashing together while he was getting into her. She is hit by the flashback of her fingers pressing the veins in the back of his forearms as if they were guitar strings on the verge of an hectic riff. Yes, a kiss on his lobe and a sip of his sweat while being over her could satiate all the thirst for love she had carried for two decades. Oh, to fall in love with a madman who wants nothing and can’t promise true love!
It had always been like that with him. Doing drugs together as foreplay: a way to transfer her addiction from emotions to substances. Moaning and moaning. Catching a breath, stealing a kiss. Noticing his lips surrender with rigidity, with a trembling pinch of passion, just enough not to let her feel completely vain. Sensing him get inside her flawed silhouette, penetrating her brain thrust after thrust, blowing out all her previous sins and indelibly marking her with new ones. And then the realisation of being pathetic, over and over.

He has left, once again. The slamming of the door closing rewinding in her ears. She’ll put a leash on her feelings, ignore the echoes of the time spent together, and live in misery without him. Yet he said he loved her, and it was true. But believing in good is always hard. Committing to self-destruction is far easier. The mattress and her hands know exactly the weight of his narrow hips, and the cushion has learnt by heart all the crooked sections of his nose, lying there tired after making her come. A shiver at the base of the spine at the thought of that, of that which will never come back.