8 ball

You couldn’t lean the way I’d shown you, though I guided your hips to be just so. And you didn’t quite grasp how to keep your wrist flat, but your knuckles up. Your conversation, too, was failing. Bringing up your mother who cheated you out of your paychecks. Your ex-boyfriend whose baby you miscarried the past month. I’d met you on your last week before Sacramento. It was happy hour at the bar. Why ruin what this was supposed to be?

Yet there we were, me giving cue advice you couldn’t translate.  You knocking in balls on my behalf. Saying things like, It was fucking crazy; I don’t know how I made it through; My life is a movie. Things I wish I could say and mean. Despite yourself, you kept the 8 ball alive.

After we wandered into that tattoo parlor, I joked how we should get matching 8 ball tattoos on our hips. You asked what it’d cost when I stopped you and explained how I planned for my first tattoo to be a poem - strewn across my chest - in the likeness of an equalizer. Meaningful. Original.  Thought out in advance.  But you were willing to etch the permanent reminder on a whim.  Of course you were! It would’ve gone with the woman snake charmer on your opposite thigh. You didn’t need courage, you were practiced with the needle.  I’m that way with the pen.

So how’s Sacramento?