I trace the scars that tattoo the dark skin of your shoulders in the back seat of my Volvo s80 and tell you to stop popping benzos so often. I like the way you sigh and roll your head back when I go down and how you wear that wig sometimes. You’re prettier than my girlfriend when you wear that shit. Sometimes I feel like I should shave my legs more often. It’s getting warmer and I’ve been wearing shorts that barely poke out the bottom of my jacket. My legs look like hairy white tubes, and when we go inside your place and you take your coat off, they pale even more next to that flash of dark flat stomach skin showing through your mesh crop top. I wish I could sing, you can’t either but my girlfriend can and I think that alone is a reason to keep her around. Sometimes I can hear her singing when she’s not even there. Like last weekend when we went to those girls’ little brick townhouse in Boystown and watched them do coke off their friend’s tits, the one with the shaved head, and we drank shitty beer, I could hear her harmonizing in my mind’s ear. But you were probably too high to remember that. I really do wish you’d slow down with the pills. One time, after all my friends left me at this house in Pilsen for a party in Cicero, I washed a handful of Xanax down with a six pack of 16oz Miller Highlife’s and thought I was going to die, projectile vomiting in the bathroom. But it’s fine now, and you’re really pretty—really, really pretty—lying here in my bed your upper lip curled up over your perfect crooked pearly smile. It’s fine now. But when I wake up and realize you aren’t next to me, realize you’ve never been over, never been in my bed, never went with me to Boystown, never been in my piece of shit Volvo, well then that’s a different story.
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Maximus Anthony Adarve is a writing major at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He has spent time and/or lived in Spain, Peru, and California. Maximus has developed his present artistic aesthetic through a life marked by frequent movement and change in his living situations and habitats. Much of the works he creates ‑which include pieces in video, photo, performance, writing, and drawing- focus on juxtaposing the inner workings of different social spheres, and ways of thought.