Her life was far from poetry. Patchwork epitaphs tattooed across her frame to form catacombs of Romeos that left her conquered.
On a Tuesday, written like any other, she slinked, wet-headed, into the kitchen for some coffee. She grabbed a cup from the sink, regarded the dark rings left from the day before, and shrugged to herself. No cream, heavy sugar, and out the door she snuck.
She drove with the windows down, drying her hair naturally, sipping her coffee cautiously: multitasking in a malaise.
She pulled into the mostly empty backlot of the strip mall, a scene already hazy from the midday heat. Her eyes watered when she stepped from the car, lengthening streaks of eyeliner painting her cheeks. But these weren't tears of sadness, they weren't of any emotion, it was the heat and the dust, nothing more.
She opened the door and, without pausing to allow her eyes to adjust to the dim restaurant lighting, turned to find the rack of aprons, quickly fitting herself with one. She punched the clock and slogged elbow-deep through her shift of back room cleaning duties.
The squeak of the door behind her bid the evening's lone farewell, wishing her solace on the ride home. As the shadows from the tree line crept across the road into her lane, her thoughts wandered back to where they stay after the sun goes down: him.
He was the last to see her laugh and the last to make her cry. She'd tried to project her thoughts of him onto other men since they'd lost one another, but she hadn't yet found one who could bear such heaviness without breaking her. These incorporeal memories of him, still as real as they are now distant, were enough to keep her pushing through the daily moil, just so she could afford to come home and be with him for a bit longer, to drift off to sleep with him at least once more.
She woke on a Wednesday, a morning like any other, nuzzled in his shirt, smiling at his lingering scent.
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