Best as it is

You consider how she wears dresses and the duration to which she keeps them on her freckled back. The colors of the fabrics on her bedroom floor, how messy and tangled all of her catalogued belongings get depending on the season. Her whereabouts on any given weeknight, and the subsequent stipulations that come with her sitting on a bar stool in hand-me-down blue jeans watching the suicide counter at the bottom of the flat screen.

Does she dazzle potential strangers with opinions on their living rooms, or like Agnes and Edith, is her night better wasted huffing chalky fumes from the newest farm-fresh batch of medications? Is there something worth talking about frozen in place outside sucking down nicotine and indifference for the sake of hooker and humane slacker alike?

You can only soberly chew the fat for so long, crossing arms and shifting your weight so as not to appear out of place, stranded and aloof by the simplistic passing of time. Her scars from mistaken intentions don't seem to bother you nearly as much as the reality encased within such hypotheticals. She can't necessarily be everything: sweet, messy intelligently stifled and long since past her creative years. You can't possibly make that much of an impression: starved for variations of contact and ridden with photographic and fanatical backwash from all the things you've come to buy, love, sell and hate in the past few months.

She would maybe laugh in a room full of people, but out on the sidewalk, there's something empty but potent rising from the gutters. The truth in the shit, and the things that the both of you will eventually choose to ignore.

Pending social obligations and a finely-tuned ability to forget, staring off into hell and forgetting to notice or call ahead. It's a song you want her to not only hear but know on the drive home. You see her in the rear view mirror checking her pupils before the mind sputters forward and you realize that nobody is worth the effort, the subsequent backlash and sugar-less tea parties. You've lost her, but always find your way back again.