A Pretty Girl Never Lights Her Own Cigarette

i remember painting the room yellow. hanging the christmas lights along the top of the walls. where they connected with the ceilings. drinking shiner and the occasional tequila shot. taking the occasional hit from the bong. of all the colors in the house, i have to take credit for the yellow. i was at the time caught up in oscar wilde, robert w. chambers, and all the other late victorian/early edwardian writers. an empire at its prime yet anticipating its fall. the color yellow represented for them decadence. and decadence was an idea, a theme, that, privately, i attempted to invoke. or did i? i'm not sure anymore. sometimes i feel as if i am projecting backwards my reminisces. sometimes i mistake yesterday for tomorrow thus letting my tenses fling forth out of apathy. or maybe antipathy. caught up in the throes of obsession. desire thwarted yet never mitigated. a continual open sore that it seemed only powders could attempt to salve. a scab continually peeled back so as to feel the healing begin again and again. i wonder sometimes where everyone else has gone. we were all the best of friends yet never speak anymore. as if seeing or speaking to each other again will conjure up all of our collective misdeeds; that the wrong word spoken at the wrong time will make everything that happened then true; that we'll all be locked in a past that has become our future. if we can collectively ignore everything we did, everything we said, everything we thought we could still hope to have a future.
who am i kidding. there is no future here. this perpetual present is wearing me down. there truly is no tomorrow just as there truly is no yesterday. i feel it in my bones just as much as i feel it in my soul. each new pleasure is tainted by the taste of what could have been; of what was. i painted that room yellow. i painted it with all my dreams, hopes, desires, and everything that defined me. i long to believe that it's still there, underneath the whitewash we used to paint over it.