Mornings are the Worst

I wake up slowly, the grey November seeping into my consciousness, warding away dream remnants, chasing out the wishes of a bright summer. It all comes back to me, my skin crawling with familiar regret, my head filling like a pitcher with a year's worth of memory. It's been a long time since there were two of us in this bed, but in sleep I still feel the safety of presence, the warmth of a body no longer there. 

I drink enough coffee to bring the dead to life. I smoke enough cigarettes to calm my sunrise nerves. I blaze through the past on a bullet train of thought. Reminiscent nostalgia takeover. I am no longer my own. 

"What a waste of a heart," I say to myself. "To spend so much love on a soul who cannot even feel it." 

Like putting money down the sink disposal and throwing the switch, I just keep tossing these sentiments out into the universe. My chest keeps pulling me, magnetic, towards the future, where it hopes it will find him waiting with flowers. 

But all the benches we pass, my heart and I, are empty, all the grocery store lines devoid of familiar faces, and the fantasies we weave of serendipitous events fade into the background of reality with every passing bleak twenty-four hours. No letters are ever ours to open, no two AM phone calls ever missed as we sleep. My heart and I, we are disappointed, still hoping for better, kicking through the dirty snow of shame.