all you can give, you want to make everything all right. save a life or maybe just save a night. so back and forth, you trade carbon dioxide and the mirrorball paints bubbles on your forehead. try to share the force necessary to keep going, one more drunken night and eventual tumble into stained sheets, resigned intimacy, and finally sweet sleep, so close to death except in that it ends.

you're tired, both of you. but you think of being without him and that's so much worse, like vertigo, like your picture in the post office. you do what you know, you try to make it work. and maybe if you exhale hard enough into him, you'll blow the passion back into this.

trouble is, you're not a mermaid and he's not a merman, and you can't keep each other from drowning. instead, you slowly poison each other and it's true that if you do it slowly enough, you both may adjust, but the toxins will eat away at what used to be you and you'll be dumb and empty shells, committed but forgetting why.

sink or swim, darling. save yourself.