Rewriting the 27 Club

“Do you know how many artists died with a white lighter on them?”

There’s weight buried here. And now every time my thumb drags across a metal wheel, begging to ignite a flame, I dig it back up. I think of your mouth. Toxic-drip of alcohol fumes. Of the way your fingers kept tugging at my waist. The white plastic, an SOS in the thicket of the night. How you thought you’d save me. The way you were just slightly too disoriented to grab the bad omen from my hand. I feel the way your thumb sat at the crook of my thigh. And how when I hid my hand behind my back your other arm slipped around me to grasp on air. Too short to steal the lighter from my clenched fist. How the second your finger tips closed on the palm of your own hand the empty air between us felt more like water clinging to my throat. Something denser than the smoky way you had been laying heavy in my chest all night. Your hand stealing at empty space. And your eyes stealing at my face. Catching at the mouth. Becoming lost as they crawled their way up to my eyes. My closed fist, a missed opportunity, sending yours to burrow into the small of my back. Kneading its way up my spine. Pressing me into something close to the shape that I was meant to be. And I remember thinking that this was it. Pressure-shift, inevitable. But then you pulled me too close. And in my surprise you tore the lighter from me. Tossed it out the window. One fluid moment. Your albatross, my beacon of hope. My mouth was disappointment-dripping. And you misread that ache. Your face pinched. The back of your hand brushing away any traces of me-disheveled. You slipped me off your lap and stumbled out of the car into the street-lamp glow. And that lighter didn’t steal my life like you thought it might. But it stole your mouth on mine. So when you held it out to me, I threw it back out into the night, thanklessly. I held my tongue between my teeth to keep from screaming. But the cheap plastic didn’t care. Your skin kept drifting farther from mine. But the cheap plastic didn’t care. Maybe when they find me wasted, rotting, that lighter will be there after all. Cheap, white plastic. Plastic-you and flameless-me. Without a care.