“lie down on the couch”
and the words sink into my bones
like butterfly wings and
poison sleep, all
murder-grey and dove-soft
in the harsh light of late morning through gauzy curtains

you skitter across my skin, my hands,
and slip below
to hover underneath my musculature
and I think
maybe you have forgiven me

it is such a little thing, forgiveness, and
tossed around
so easily

the orange sunlight streams through
the windows
your fingers at my pulse, cold and compact, with nails unadorned
dig in.
my breathing slows and
I wait,
patiently,
for the injection to begin.

She does not belong here.

And all the empty cans of Lucky, all sitting straight in a line; awash in the bloody light of the bar, they stand like tin soldiers awaiting orders or maybe just someone to pick them up as they go by. Rejects, all of them maybe.

She sits in a corner with with her headphones in her ears but no music playing. The pounding bass and drums would it out anyway, she thinks with a sneer. This is a favour, nothing more and nothing less. If it had been anyone else asking, she ould have given them a flat fuck no.

But the asker is her best friend, her oldest friend, her most beloved friend, and so she goes and sits in the bar with the stupid music that she has no attachment to whatsoever and forces herself not to sleep.

The singer growls into the microphone. It is a harsh sound, sharp but low and angry. She fights not to cover her ears and rock back and forth because I’m scared, I’m so scared, I don’t fit in, why did I come—

Everything about this situation is so so wrong. So so tiring. So so… not.

She doesn’t really have words for it, beyond that. The light is red and strangely calming. She feels like how murder witnesses must fee; trapped with no escape in a world of flat grey, black, red.

She does not belong here.

“Except the thing is—the thing is—” and her throat closes up before she has the chance to go anywhere with the sentence. She can’t quite put it to words, what she’s trying to say. It’s one of those feelings that sort of sit at the edge of her consciousness; doesn’t really have a name, but it’s a scent of memory that she feels like she should know. It’s an edge; the eighth colour of the rainbow that she doesn’t have a name for.

She glares at him through her bangs. “The thing is—”

“The thing is nothing,” he grins, teasing.

She all but screams at him, jerking back and forth and still trying to vocalize her rage.

It doesn’t work.

Instead, she punches him so hard, she knocks the wind out of him. She stands back, the odd flavour still on her tongue, and smirks.

“The thing is,” she says decisively.

And it is enough.

No one noticed Kat was gone until it’d been six weeks with no word. Alli looked up, one morning in early June, and wondered where her friend had gone. “Has anyone seen Kat lately?” she asked, later, at night when the group gathered for the weekly drinking marathon. She looked around at all of them, expecting some sort of acknowledgement at least from Noah. But there’s nothing, and the confused silence lingered.

“Someone text her,” said Emmy decisively. “I haven’t seen her in ages!”

But none of them had seen her in ages, and the feeling of déjà vu thrilled along her spine. Kat had always been one to need long spaces of silence and solitude, but even then she’d always at least said hello.

“I’ll do it,” Noah said, forehead furrowed. Alli thought that he was trying to remember the last time he’d seen Kat’s dark hair and it was funny, because she couldn’t remember, either.

In silence, they drank their beer and waited.

The buzzing of the phone was a start. Alli looked up and focused on him, waiting for the verdict. His face went dark as he read it, then he tossed the phone to the table to let the others see.

Fuck you, this is costing me a fortune. I’m in Paris. 

Alli didn’t know what to think. Why hadn’t she said anything?

Another text came from across the ocean.

Don’t come looking. You won’t find me. 

And this, honestly, this? This is not getting her anywhere. It’s not getting her anywhere or getting her anything, except a lot of problems, really. This whole brooding-on-the-bathroom-floor thing, it does not fly.

But Christ, she can’t help it, she can’t. It’s just that he’s—he’s this special person who she doesn’t really deserve (and yeah, okay, she knows she doesn’t deserve him. Like at all. She stomped all over his heart, only to apologize, and then do it again—that is not conducive to deserving someone), and sometimes he leaves her little notes and once he brought her flowers and it’s just—it’s not enough. It should be, but it’s not.

Because here’s the thing:

She has these great friends, and they’re the people that she loves the best. She trusts them more than anything. But they—um, they don’t like him. Which she can’t really blame them for, she guesses, because she’s only told them the bad but not the good, like how sometimes he reminds her of autumn; wrapped up tight in a blanket in from of the fireplace and peeling chestnuts under lamplight. And how it’s okay, this thing they do, how it’s all okay, because even though they like fucking each other up, they like fucking everyone else up more.

It’s pretty twisted.

But it’s sort of… sort of good. Sort of quiet.

He brings her a coffee from a shitty coffee place she hates (yeah, she hates it—eat it, bitch). She only sips it, makes a face, and then shoves it at him.

“You know I hate that shit,” she says. “Why even bring it?”

He smirks. “Because you always make that face.”

“I hate you,” she says cheerfully.

“I know.”

And he just sits there, across the table, like this is totally normal. And maybe it is.

She sighs, and shakes her head. “I’m gonna make some tea.”

She doesn’t offer any and he doesn’t ask and when she turns away she tries to breathe and thinks that this? This is going to be the fucking death of me. I know you don’t mean to be, but it is, because you’re kind of my endgame, I think, even if you don’t know it.

She doesn’t say any of that out loud, though.

Instrumental v.s. lyrical? It’s a weird question for a Wednesday night.

Oh my. Tooooooo deep for right now 

She doesn’t even want to know. She bites her lip and asks her stupid questions anyway. Are you drunk? Sorry, I had a talk with the dean of the university today. I need to… not brain.

She is pretty sure she can hear him laughing.

That’s braining. No I’m not

She doesn’t believe him for a second. At least it’s braining about something I like. Sup?

Watching tv with liv an mike he says.

Something jumps in her throat, and she really wants to hate all three of them—especially Liv because even though Liv is pretty much her best friend, she offered to hang out that evening and the bitch turned her down.

She shouldn’t say she’s all that surprised.

Mmmmmhmmmmmm 

She thinks about the fact that that is a shitty reply. She tells him so. And: But I guess I didn’t give you much to work off, huh?

No, but I’m a little busy 

Sure he is.

She sighs, runs her fingers through her hair, and doesn’t text him back.

“I do…” she says, and pauses, tries to breathe, “I do love you, you know.” “I know,” he mutters. He doesn’t quite look her in the eye. He hasn’t looked her in the eye in a long time—maybe, she thinks, maybe he’ll never look her in the eye again. Maybe they’ll both just pretend that they’re still okay until they both die. Or just their friendship. Relationship. Thing. She doesn’t know what to call it, okay?

It’s just a little thing.

She stares at her hands.

“So what do we do?” she asks.

“Dunno,” he says.

“We can’t just—”

“We can.”

“We can’t!” she argues. Her voice catches and suddenly she’s mad; suddenly she’s so, so mad that she could just push him off a cliff. Suddenly she hates him—god, she hates him so much. She hates him because even after everything, even after all this time, he still thinks it’s a game.

But it was never a game.

She glares at him, sparking up with fire and rage. It hazes over her tongue, tasting like ash and whiskey. She crosses her arms and says “I dare you to tell me can, when you know that we can’t. It won’t ever work, and it’s not okay! This is not okay!”

He looks at her.

He is so, so tired.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“You fucked up,” she tells him. Violently, viciously. “You fucked up.”

“I know.”

She touches the top of his head, gentle but mad. She’s so, so mad. “I know you know.”

“Maybe I’ll see you at school,” he offers.

“Yeah, maybe.”

But probably not.

Because it’s not okay.

It’s not okay.

Sitting in bed, waiting and waiting. My heart bursts and the maggots crawl out through the cave of my chest, turned to butterflies halfway through and flying up and up, a shattered rainbow dancing above me just to disappear into the clouds.

The Sahara dries my throat and the bugs burrow beneath my eyelids, stripping away optic nerves and flesh but still I see, still I know. Sand on the wind and sweet white wine, sweet white paint, but which one do I drink? Like children’s games with a string—see the cat? See the cradle?—there is loss and love in your eyes.

And still the world turns.

On love and war and friendship, back and forth until everything is politics, yours and mine. Or perhaps everything is friendship but I cannot tell. There is nothing and everything and I hold your heart in my cupped hands, pumping blood and feelings and stringing me along. String, strang, strung, like the twelve-string in the basement humming wish you were here in the glow of a sunset.

Up to my elbows in bubbles, I try to remember that we are better this way.

They sat around a circular table on a Tuesday night in a quiet bar, low on cash and lower on vodka. Cigarette butts still burned red though they were sucking on empty, but the three men seemed to pay it no mind. “Mother of—I fold,” snarled one, tossing his cards to the tabletop.

“Heh,” snickered another. “Raise you two.”

“See your two and raise you four,” replied the third mildly.

“Confident, are we?”

“Yeah,” he smiled. He was just a child in this crowd, barely eighteen but already toying with loaded dice and lighter fluid. He sat there with his cards, flicking the silver box open and closed to light up his face.

“Fine. See your four. Whaddaya got?”

“Straight-flush, hearts; five, six, seven, eight, nine.”

“…Not bad.”

The boy collected the chips and even though they were playing for nothing (no one had enough money to play for something), it sent a surge of pleasure through him as he gathered everything on the table into a pile.

Not bad at all.

it’s one of those nights where the sky is empty. no stars, no moon. just empty. it feeds on you, you know. feeds on your light. everyone has light. it keeps us going. keeps us laughing, cying, hating, feeling, living. but nights like this…

well, we all have to die sometime, don’t we?

the thoughts choke up my lungs on night like this. like cigarette smoke, they thicken the air until nothing can get through. not water, that’s for sure, and i’m just so thirsty. what i wouldn’t give to breathe. what i wouldn’t give.

they say that you can have wishes.

but the problem with miracles is that they cost things—they cost everything. a life for a life for a life, but what do you have to pay for a wish? do you have to give up your light, for a wish?

would you even want to?

is there anything worth dying for? people die for ideas all the time. freedom. it’s one of those things we take as forever, but i’ve seen people willingly give up their freedom for a false sense of security. is it worth it? is it ever worth it?

my arms hurt. the muscles, i mean. i can feel them shift beneath my skin like bugs or maybe snakes. i want to crawl outside of myself, leave myself behind. in the greater scheme of things, that’s probably not something i should want, but i can’t help it.

when it’s dark like this, being alone is the last thing i want.

there is nothing but silence.

i guess it’s just one of those things.