Excerpt from "Linear Subtleties"

The glistening shine of the disinfected surfaces in your apartment reflecting the sunlight awoke me in my stale and sweaty state of being. My eyes were still playing a mastered amount of tricks on me; the individual dashes on the digital alarm clock appearing fractured. It was P:UE, your remaining presence apparent in the scattered trail of garbage you left behind.
The long black stockings you wore the previous eventing to one of your "best" friend's apartments. She was sloshed when we arrived commenting on the joy of sex with inanimate rubber objects, while her new Asian boyfriend giggled and shuffled the racy playing cards. My hands grazed the threadbare fabric of your legs, twice-bitten and jagged fingernails later leaving the passionate remains of pinkish red scratches on your elegant skin.
I saw you checking your neck and torso, naked in the bathroom mirror that morning in-between states of consciousness; my fumbling hands knocking over your over-priced products full of organic teasers and false promises. I gently cleaned the rim of the toilet seat of both our fluids and hairs, before opening your medicine cabinet and swallowing a rainbow dry. My head was uneasy from the French sauce with a distinguishably trashy name that sounded like a translated venereal disease. Its thick contents had stuck to the contours of both our throats; the taste lingering in my mouth even more so after I used your fluorescent orange toothbrush to scrub away the remaining maroon stains in and around the fire. My tongue was still singed from the fondue and your vicious guffaw occurring as planned every time your friend ruined an anecdote.
I thought of the both of you on ladies' night, drinking with vacant concerns for your livers and discussing the brutal truths, before you both settled in next to each other, in no condition for another long tomorrow of routines. I would place you in dozens of hypothetical situations that morning, as I smoked the last few cigarettes in my pack, and tried for better reception on your close-to-obsolete televising set. Part of me was glad that we hadn't succumbed to the bored remedial crawl of reality programming, and yet your systematically marked and dated audition tapes made me second guess previous actions made, and words said on later night when I wasn't so uninhibited.
Strangers noticed me with you; the individual lines on both our faces acting as a catalyst for suicide and city apartment depression. I wasn't exactly happy with the roaches and your affinity to feed them from the table, but nevertheless continued to grant you the benefit of the doubt, simply because I had convinced myself that most situations were love. I couldn't handle myself and the perpetual motion of my tainted thoughts as they rose and fell like straight-laced gages in a lazy piece of aged machinery. You were never necessarily there for me in anything but spirit; this concept becoming clearer as the morning ultimately faded, not one incoming all stirring me from the sofa that we had problems carrying upstairs.
The comfort of narrow hallways and the loose-lipped affection we couldn't keep to ourselves upon all returns home. It made me sentimental and dignified in my poor decisions. They kept me breathing fresh air, and making sure to check its consistencies as the molecules exited my body, wandering what else was possibly out there, just for me.
We had found each other, which made me wonder what new messes were waiting for me in the other small and expensive rooms of a city that would constantly lie through its teeth about sleeping. I would venture out towards the cracks after lunch.