You’re hurting me. Haven’t you had enough yet?

Just a little more, you say breathlessly. Your thick fingers lace firmly around my neck, leaving my skin marred by elongated indentations, a souvenir of your carelessness. But no one will notice. No one ever takes the time to examine my veneer, to scrutinize what was once a sleek and shiny face, now a peeling and dented facade functioning only to barricade my insides, my insides which still occasionally find an exit through the cracks you’ve made along my exterior. My insides seep through.

If I was made of glass, I’d have shattered long ago, shards of my dignity and worth and esteem would spray through the air like candy from a piñata. But I am still fragile – not made of glass, but still fragile.

There was tenderness in the beginning, when our relationship was fresh, straight from the shelf. You applied gentle means to pour me out, and I was enough for you; you had no need for foul play or any extra garnishes on the side. But what was once a partnership has begun to shape-shift into something horrifically unilateral. You dominate me now, crushing me of my contents. I used to willingly bleed for you, I loved to bleed for you, to watch deliriously as my russet essence flowed into purled pools on your ivory plate. When I become less cooperative, your once-gentle hands turn into meat-fists, squeezing me dry, exsanguinating me against my will; your pursed lips spit fifty-seven insults in my face. Sometimes, you strike me hard along my ribs with the heel of your calloused hand, all for one drop of my blood.

One drop.  Does that satisfy you, that one drop, seeing my gore trickle slowly past my lips, like slow-flowing lava finally losing momentum? I hope it tastes good to you.

Even for your friends, I stand tall and willing. Take of me what you will, I sigh to myself, I sigh for abatement, I sigh for the privilege of being tossed and discarded. I sigh.  Spend most of my days sitting in my dark room, where I sigh the most, only bathing in light when you come in looking for something.

But did you know that I sat out in the open for an entire week, stewing and coagulating in your neglect? A dash of hate, a smidgen of pain, stir in the self-pity. The perfect self-loathing stew.  

And now, now that I have barely anything else to give short of scraping my insides with a knife, you must know that your use for me is near-expiration. That’s why you go out at night, saying you’re just running out to Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Burger King. A late night snack, you assure, but you give it away with the lascivious leer your lips have hardened into, like two coils of Play-Doh left to bake in the summer’s sun.

I’m left to sit in the dark, helpless and paralyzed, half-drained of life; life that I used to willingly pour out for you. You abused that, as I know you’ve abused others before me. Did you hit them, throttle them, shake them too? In my dim sanctuary, I cower when I hear you return. I know you bring them home with you — smaller versions of me in trimmer, shinier packaging. I’ve caught you before.

It’s easier to maneuver them over my meat, you explain, never wiping away that smirk of a carnal conquistador. It’s just that you can be a bit bulky.

I scream at you, demanding to know where you find them. You say you skulk around for them in convenience stores and drive-thrus. I’m not enough for you? What you have here at home isn’t good enough? How much do you pay for them? I need to know that I am worth more, even with a scarred countenance. You say they came to you for free, that if you were going to pay for them, they would be classier, tangier.

Pick me.

Choose me.

Use me.

Abuse me.

In spite of my jealousy, when you don’t come to roughly retrieve me, grappling me with your strong hands, I drown in a cloud of hopeless relief, knowing that it’s one less time for you to vampirize me, to see you with that vermilion badge of conquest smeared across your lips.

Songs in the supermarket. It’s like all those songs I’d hear in the supermarket, the ones that’d make me rolls my eyes. The ones about love gone wrong and the ones about desperation and philandering and I hear these songs now in my head and I think My God, I’m living these songs. These songs apply to me now. All the “Baby come back”s and the “You don’t bring me flowers anymore”s and now I’m nodding along and crying, like the product of abuse I swore I’d never be.

I knew this from the beginning, when I slowly began noticing that I was surrounded by remnants and relics of your past – a lingering scent of honey, a smudge of crimson staining your shirt. You are a fickle man, I know this now, with an insatiable palate for the new and exotic. I knew that I would be too pedestrian for you, and you would soon find yourself dreaming of foreign flavors, only granting entrance to the ones dressed in designer labels. But I thought I’d have more time.

You fling me back into the pits where my heart will glaciate with frost. You move on then to mustards, maybe tartars, salsas, and now I miss you.

My new favorite picture of my son, taken by Photog Extraordinaire, Cynthia Leigh. She works at Olan Mills now and is very irritated that they won’t let her offer these types of poses. I’d prefer this over Chooch propped up against a large plastic number, that’s for sure.

That fleck on his nose is his battle wound after a particularly lame bout with a box.

This man and his very stylish jacket walked past me last week when I was taking pictures with my rudimentary pinhole camera. I wished that the jacket had been a dress, I would have said, "Nice frock, cuz."

I’m waiting for the slow Harrison sisters to shower. They’re in from Cincinnati, specifically for game night, because they know that game night is where it be. I think we’re going to get some Ethiopian cuisine for lunch, which is kind of ironic that I’d choose to go somewhere that outlaws utensils after devoting an entire entry to messy food and the many ways I hate it. That’s me: a multi-faceted gem of contradictions.

Tomorrow night is game night at my house. Bob was talking about how he might bring one of his friends, but that he promised they wouldn’t get out of control. I said something stupid about how that’s OK because I don’t like control.

One of the dayshift guys was still here. He turned in his seat and asked, "Erin, you were one of those kids who had a red A with a circle painted on their locker, weren’t you?"

I laughed and Collin, always forgetting his place, muttered something about a scarlet letter. There was a moment of silence, and then the dayshift man said awkwardly, "Well, I was thinking more along the lines of the anarchy sign…."

It’s nice to know my co-workers think so highly of me. At least now I’ll have a use for the leftover marinara sauce festering in my garbage can. If you need me, I’ll be the girl with pigtails and a moist and tasty finger-painted ‘A’ on her forehead.

Messy food. I hate it. I could never even fully embrace sloppy joes when I was growing up, and isn’t that like, the dream meal of youth? Any meal that requires a napkin the size of a tarp spells out tedium to me. Maybe if it were cubed into bite-sized morsels and someone wearing a tophat and tails spoonfed it to me, I’d have applauded happily like the children in the Mamwich commercials. Then we could call them lazy joes.

I hate the sensation of cookie dough between my fingers.

“Now’s the fun part, kids! Get your hands in there! Make a mess!” No thanks, please pass the latex gloves. I think maybe this is why I never got into pottery.

Tonight at work, we ordered out.

I put a lot of thought into it, as I generally do with everything in life, before settling on a half of an eggplant parmesan hoagie. In past experiences, these hoagies have not been kind to me. You have your rebellious slivers of egglant, slipping off the sandwich and landing in your lap with a greasy plop. You have your strings of melted cheese, pliant and elastic, snapping in half and busting you in the cheek like a broken rubber band. You have globs of marinara that wants desperately to be your new lipstick. You have pieces of bread, paste-like once it mingles with the saliva, becoming caps for your front teeth.

This time, I was prepared. My desk was equipped with a stockpile of napkins; I halved the hoagie; I took slow, small, and careful bites. With luck, I can finish my second half without appearing as though I just ate out a streetwalker with a can of tomato paste plugging her vagina.