The Flavor of your Affections

2 min


You drank to numb yourself out from your own mind & thoughts.

I drank for all the ones you shared.

The ones that slipped through your lousy, loosened filter. The ones the drink decided were fine to be set free. Or maybe it’s because of the drink, the filter could no longer prevent the thoughts from pouring out.

I don’t know which is worse.

You drank to connect to some inner turmoil that normally you were too anxious to tap into, work through.

I drank to connect with you.

To cheers, and feel like every moment with you was one to celebrate, even when they weren’t. To be on your level, with you or at least make it feel like I was. Make you believe I was.

You drank to “get the creative juices flowing.” Allow the rhyme or reason to free flow in verse, messy handwriting, slurred song. Fingers so numb they didn’t register the blood dripping from them after hours of plucking rusty metal strings.

I drank to shed my anxiety on what those secret words may mean. The ones spilling from your lips on nights like these. Afraid of the pain you maybe in, hiding it in the sobering rays of daylight. Guilt pooling into me adding up by the shot glass full of all the signals I may have missed without the truth elixir in my blood.

You drank to remember sex was more then an activity for your hand, phone and shower.

I drank just incase you decided I was what you wanted tonight.

The flavor of your affections varying on the drink you fueled your soul with that evening.

Vodka = taken from my cabinet, desperate to dissipate from reality, moody.

Tequila = Oh no, dangerous, sad, a danger to yourself, I needed to babysit.

Whiskey = loving, creative, talkative, I will be what you crave around 3AM.

*Special Shoutout* to the one we both banned, Malt Liquor, 40’s, Cobra’s, Mickey’s, the cheap shit that goes by many names- made you Mean. Cruel. The darks of your eyes absorbed the man I could connect to under any other guise.

Wine, our shared lover-

The mistress we always were happy to fall entangled into a m�nage � trois with, she brought out our honesty and lust. The real romantics we felt truly connected us.

You drank because you couldn’t handle the world you built for yourself.

What I needed to learn is, you would drink regardless of your love for me. Regardless if your world had me in it or not.

You drank for you. I drank for you.

I think Love, that it never was really about the drinks, but instead it was just about what you were running away from, and what I was desperate to understand within you. You chose your catalyst and I followed suit, as a lover desperate to be loved by a man more distracted by the demons in his glass then the girl guarding his heart.

  • Photo by Rachel Henning
  • This is my own work and has not been generated in whole or in part by AI

Hayley Matto

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