No matter how long I waited for it, the day when I no longer cared about her never came; even though she was out of my life, plain as plain can be. The only goodbye she left was a Day-of-the-Dead skull with my face painted on, and glass vial of her blood.
For the first couple of months after she left, I focused all of my pain and fear- and anger- on that tiny vial. I’d come home after long nights of searching for her in dive bars and adult book stores, and sit and stare at that vial. No matter how long I’d look at it, I just couldn’t figure out the reason she had in leaving me that little glass mystery.
Did she think that was what I was after in the first place? Or could it have been something simpler than that, and I was just too thick to understand?
One night, I was in the worst of the town’s bars, and I got the beating of a lifetime. All I remember from that night was going into the bar, and the staggering home sometime later, covered in my own blood.
Then I drank her blood.