“Welcome to paradise.”

You knew how to smile and make it last even after it had gone. Flashes of your teeth and pouted pink lips every single time I closed my eyes like a quiet tattoo etched into the insides of my eyelids. My skin was crawling against yours from the heat and the more I sighed, the more your fingernails dug into my hips. I was lost—somewhere in the middle of the ocean—but you had been found simultaneously between my thighs and something about that made it alright. The floorboards shook underneath us, like a house that cried over what it had taken and what it could never give back. And the stars peeked through the sky like tiny pinholes, your face half made of milk and half hidden in the shadows that lurked there. Every thrust made you more discouraged, like you were trying to find something that was not there. Hunting for skin over limbs only to find bone, a hard interior where everything should be soft and sweet like teaspoons of sugar on your tongue. You wanted a postcard from the sea. “Welcome to paradise,” it would say and instead you found something that formed like spider webs in the corners of ourselves everywhere we’d go. So you finished with moans that grew shallow underneath the groans of frustration, the ocean leaving me salted and dry and you pulled out a cigarette to fill the room with something other than regret. The ceiling above the layer of smoky air was beginning to chip away, I remember and I watched while you buried your head in your hands, the taste of copper and sulfur somewhere in-between my teeth. Welcome to paradise indeed.