(Poetry) Dedicated to December 28th

They tell you not to eat before it happens.
They tell you to hold it in until they can get a sample.
They tell you to wait. To enter. To put this gown on. To lay down.
That this is going to be cold here and there, as they pump you full of drugs.
To count down from a hundred.
If you're ready.
But you're never ready.
Even when they say
"This is going to be uncomfortable just for a second"
and
"This might pinch".

Then after wards,
they hand you a bottle that is supposed to make the pain, go away.
They give you a clean little packet of papers, that is supposed to explain everything you need to do for the next two week,
and if anything should happen that isn't covered on those pages,
to give them a call.

But you can't call them after you wake up from another nightmare.
You can't call them when the shock finally catches up to you.
Their papers don't cover how you'll have to stand there with the knowledge that you let that 'thing' go.
That 'thing' you and others told you you'd be better off without.
 That 'thing' that books and movies describes as "the best thing to happen to you".
Clearly making what you did "the worst thing to happen to you",
right?

But that pain doesn't originate in the losing it,
 it's in the wanting to keep it with every fiber of your being
 since the moment you woke up in a half daze to test yourself at five in the morning.
 That moment when you think your mind is playing a cold trick on your heartstrings,
 and yet even after the floor stops spinning,
 you're left facing that it did actually happen to you.
 Even as you're calling the other member to this party,
 long distance,
 at a reasonable hour that is long past the hours you've been living with this realization alone.
 Trying to convince him to fly down to your hometown now,
 no not three weeks from now,
 but now.
 Right here.
 At a distance that his arms will fill the empty space between yours,
close enough so his words can convince you out of your desires.
Where the need to feel his skin is satiated, because it's the only thing that will be like that thing that is growing inside of you.
Whenever you need to feel the brush of his hair against your cheek, because it's the only crown of hair similar to the one inside of your body.
The one you'll never touch.
The one you'll never see.

They never tell you how you have the date burned into your memory,
 like a cattle prod
afterwards.
And that every year you will have to drink yourself into a stupor to celebrate the loss of something that took a part of you with it.
They never tell you that afterwards,
 you feel half the woman you were before.
 Even when they remind you of what you can have again,
 and again,
 and again.
 None of that matters.
 How can it?
 The first one was let go,
no...
ripped out.
Pinched out.
How can you replace that feeling?
That longing?

That's right.
 You replace it with his words,
 when every night you woke up in sweat over another vision of her beautiful face,
 and her precious laugh
 that you have on a tape cassette that repeats itself against your discarded innocence.

His words of "Don't worry baby, we'll have another one"
But you're asking yourself, another what?
Accident?
Isn't that what he called it?
Isn't that what it had always been,
even after he left you shortly after?
After you went insane with the post-traumatic depression,
stress,
anxiety,
tragedy,
 after you swallowed an entire bottle of pills in front of him
not knowing if it was for you, him, or her?

But then I guess,
we really did have 'another', after all.