tea without steam

Ours was bone-dry. I threw it under a bus and watched it powder the concrete, ash-white. Rain arrived last— the finishing touch— smoothing the whiskers before it vanished. Or would you have preferred I trashed it— mailed it to the junkyard of lost things, praying for a resurrection, a reckoning to clear the air weighted with ten tons of disappointment? The chronicle waits. A fresh page. Commitment reduced to a word— not a spell, not a reset. What’s done stays done. Tea without steam. Lukewarm. The kind you spit out Like Henry, frantic to scrub his sins with crowns and vows, I remain the sinner in your eyes. So I choose impact. I douse the engine in nightmare fuel, let it swerve toward consequence— grant us one clean second of clarity before ignition, before the inferno neither of us will remember. Better this than sainthood— battling cold and waves, pedaling toward shore while you flip the boat in your hurry to leave, land finally in sight.