I'm a married man and a father of two, soon to be three — though I fathered none of them myself, and I'm no more in love with my wife than she is with me, her second husband.
I'm Zion, no last name because I've disowned the places that spawned me long ago, sacrificed them to the pyres, and I don't need the fancy pretenses. This is it, no backstage passes needed, none of the show happens behind the curtains. I'm living post-apocalypse, all of us are in this twisted web of truths sharper than any lie, and sometimes I didn't care that she was having another man's baby from the first day I met her; I'd just curl her knees up over a kitchen contour and set fire to her fuse until the both of us were shaking like dying. Goddess, dark empress, that wife of mine. I could love her more, if I didn't hate her so much, if she wasn't so much like me deep down in ways that kill me to actually recognize. Goddess, dark empress, that viperous bitch. If I didn't love her so much, I'd see her rot in hell, festering like the evil cunt she is. Only I do love her in this way that, by no means, binds me contractually to her in any kind of permanent way.
It means that we have is convenience, an agreement. I believe that she doesn't love me at all, no matter how better-suited I am to her than the last husband or to the father of the baby she's round with now, I merely offer her what she desires — safety, financial security, anonymity for herself and for the up-and-coming bastard. I'm supposed to pretend this bastard's mine and I will, but knowing the father is a Vega, I sometimes wonder if it really is completely my mind that I think with these days. Would they kill me if anyone else ever figured it out? Would they be able to? My wife's phenomenal with a Glock and I wonder if she wouldn't stand by her man in a tough spot, if only out of sheer familial obligation. Crazy bitch is pretty serious about family, lost a son of her own right before I met her to some kind of creeping heart condition, and she has a daughter from her first marriage. Sylvie, charming quiet child, a miniature version of her mother, the porcelain doll with the lucid, yellowish green eyes; I don't think she approves of me, nor would she ever were I to do something foolish like stick around forever. Don't worry, sweetheart, I wouldn't dream of it and I'm more than sure your damn mother feels the same way.
We don't wear our wedding rings. It'd be easier to take them off if we never had to put them on to start with, after all. I feel like someone's probably going to end up dead by the end of this whole thing, and it better not be me.
It's the first week that's a complete blur and all that she can remember are the unforgivable specifics — sprawled out in her dead son's old twin bed in this room at the Chicago three-bedroom house where he lived as a boy, all the visual memoria disturbed by the sedatives, her little sister asking her here and there if she needed help to the bathroom so she would nod, barely registering the pale face within the similar black ripple of punk-rock long hair; the funeral, the white-lacquered child's coffin sinking into the trenched brown earth surrounded by corpse-lush green lawn, the sad songs muted behind the preacher's voice and how stiff the black dress she wore felt; standing in front of the tombstone alone for a thirty minutes, arms crossed, knees weak but legs holding, staring as if she didn't understand what it was precisely that she was doing there, a world where nothing seemed very real; the eventual comprehension, the realness striking home, on her knees with her hands covering her face and her father's arms strong around her until she finally allowed him to hold her, how much it could physically hurt if she wept hard enough.
There was the wake at her father's house, her daughter in her aunt's arms as her mother sat red-eyed and still on a chair in the backyard, barely noticing her friends when they spoke. After the first hour, her father held her hand and she thought distantly that he must understand how this would feel. He had lost his Sam (and so had she), she had lost her Scottie (and so had he.) At first, she couldn't recall what her daughter ate in the morning or what she'd worn that day. All she knew was the sporty pattern of her son's bedspread, the sting of the sunlight through the thin cloth curtains when it was daytime, the moist ache in her thick-feeling throat, and the feeling that the entire world had shattered inward on itself.
That was the first week.
I'm in the car that's not mine and I'm driving ninety-two miles an hour on the interstate because I just need to go, I need to get out of here, I need to leave right fucking now. I want to turn off the next exit so that I can break into a million different pieces, but instead I curl my fingers tighter around the steering wheel until the knuckles white completely out so that I'm not tempted because if I break now, I might not be able to put the pieces back together in time. This has all gone too far, too far, and I'll call a few people once I'm there if I'm able to dial the numbers. I don't know if I'll be able, but I'll try. I'll try hard to do the right thing, at least for a couple people, because I'm not trying to blame anyone. Not this time. This time, I'm blaming me.
But I can't do this anymore. I can't even look at myself in the mirror lately, I'm not proud of what I'm becoming. I'll try to find the little pieces of me in the there and the then, the old me, the one that's breaking apart at the seams, screaming at the top of its frail little lungs. I have to survive, me, my blood and then me (the real me, not the face that I've worn so long that I'm now having difficulty separating it from the other me), no one else matters.
I'll kill you, he says, but he already has and now I'm remembering so I have to remind myself that bad things happen, horrible uncontrollable things, and it'll be okay until it really is okay. My baser instincts have kicked in so I almost don't even care that I'm leaving a disastrous little cluster-fuck in my wake — the Russians, Prince, and all the other terrible things in between, all the other terrible people in between. I'm so sorry, but I'm not as strong as they think I am, I'm just not, and I can't handle this anymore. None of that is important anymore, nobody else is important, only this matters.
In three more exits, I'll stop, I'll park the Lamborghini and I'll hotwire something discreet. I'll do this several times until I reach Chicago. I didn't think to tell anyone when I left and maybe the shock is starting to numb me now like a slow-working toxin because that doesn't even matter to me. It'll be on the news in a few minutes, or a few hours. I'm about to force myself to make one phone call, but I'll need to stop somewhere to use a payphone because I left mine in the middle of the floor of the room I was given. I don't remember hanging up. I don't remember saying goodbye.
I'll call her. I'll ask her to ask Nikolai to interfere just this once. I never wanted to ask her that — believe me, God, I never wanted to have to, because I know if she does this for me (and she will) that she'll owe him. She'll owe him the kind of debt that she's never wanted to pay back. But he's the only one I think can handle Prince now, and if he doesn't kill him, he'll make sure that Prince stays away for now. It's imperative that Prince doesn't take advantage of this. It matters too much. It matters enough to ask her to make this kind of sacrifice for me, for the people that I love.
I've been so scared of what could happen, all of them due to violence — but all I heard through the deafening hammer of blood through my ears was my father's voice on the phone earlier. Oh god, oh Jesus, I'm so sorry and heart condition and we never saw it coming, I'm so fucking sorry, no one saw it coming. They've been hiding out in Washington where I planned to keep everyone safe until all this blew over, they'll come on an airplane and they'll bring the body.
I can't breathe. I can barely see the interstate as it all flies by me. It's all I can think about now.
In just a couple days, I'll have to bury my son.
It's another apartment room now, another city. I'm back home, I suppose you could say, but this isn't Chicago. You don't want to know what happened there. It's all cocaine, mind-and-body rape, murder. They think I live life glamorously but there's nothing spectacular about the way that I've been dying. Jett wrote this in my journal and I've read it a hundred times since.
"It feels like being on fire in my head. Every time strips back another layer, every day I am a new man. No matter what touches you and no matter what demons come calling, you're mine. I would lie and I would kill and I would die."
I left him a few days ago. We fought, I packed a suitcase and locked the door behind me on the way out. There will be no crawling back, no desperate apologies. I'd rather fill myself full of pills and step off the top story of this building into the traffic below because if he doesn't come, he doesn't love me. Not the way that I need him to love me. In Chicago, he killed a man over me and surely that's love, isn't it? We haven't had sex since before then, and if that puts him off, so be it. This is an incredible sickness inside of me: my diseased mind and my corpse's heart.
I always liked his roughness, preferred it, but I still will not live without his compassion. In Vegas, I thought that we could do this and now I don't know. I've thought about making this all go away the last several days; how I would let it die. It's too much to handle, everything that happened and everything that I am and everything I cannot grasp. He killed a man, true enough. I've killed several, it's self-survival and it's the law you design for yourselves. I was the one violated, penetrated; helpless. Maybe I'm not recovering the way he would like me to, but I don't know how to fix myself. I never did and that's why I'm where I am today.
One thing I do know? There's someone else out there somewhere that would chase after me. Sex isn't enough once you've tasted what-could-be. All I want is to be loved; to be really loved. The mistake I made was believing he could. It just wasn't as bad as the mistake I made believing I would be okay if I loved him back. I don't know if it's just the moment, my anxiety, or my depression but I don't think I'll ever be okay.
For now, I'll just lie and say everything's all right though I would kill and I would lie and I would die.
"Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and, it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you — then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life. You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness. So simple a phase like maybe we should just be friends turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."
A piece of paper was pinched in between her forefinger and thumb, a match-lit flame licking seductively across it. On the fire escape buried into the cracking side of Elliston Place where all the dreams came true and all the nightmares did too, she sat on the twisted thin iron handrail five floors up and let her past words burn into a summer wind far too heavy with heat. Glowing red lined the page where the fire had sputtered out in areas, dwindling, while the rest flickered violently, ash kissing the air. When it became too out of control, she let it drop from her fingers and it shuddered, flying through the air with its ashes toward the dirty cobblestone alley floor below. There was no one else home and she took advantage of the privacy to let loose the skeletons in her closet, whom broke from their prison and danced suggestively in the night, beckoning her to join in but no — no, she was sitting on the fire escape with a tape recorder journal under her cigarette-smoky lips, the red button pushed as far down as it would go.
I met him in a bar and I knew he wasn't good enough for me from the start. Or as good as I must somehow think I deserve. He wore an awful hat that I thought would look a hundred times better on fire somewhere in some dumpster, but not many men know how to look attractive: or at least, not on purpose. Cute, though, in that kind of way that a favorite shirt is even when it's been through the wash at least thirty times after the buy; looked like Caleb, really, Caleb who I think I must've loved once with the tracks on his arms to match. But I don't want to blur around the edges, I want the world to. There's a big difference in how I want to be perceived and how I wish to perceive. They never understand that. I don't want to work myself down to the bone and the downward spiral and never surface. I want to push and shove and scream until I find the ladder up, because there has to, I repeat, there has to be a way out of all of this and sometimes I'm so sure of that. My compass points due South and somehow I survive when all my compass-kin end up six feet under, drowning with bullets in their beautiful brains and constricted at the heart with a total sickness. I cry, I cry that he died on the floor with a bullet in his beautiful brain. Not because I loved him because I won't pretend to have, I won't lie and say he was my world when he was only a taxi ride. One quiet, but memorable taxi ride. I cry because I walked inside the moonlight with him three weeks ago and he memorized me along the plasma of the night, like a nocturne's egg-white separated from the yolk, telling me how beautiful I was. I cry because I was kissing him two weeks ago in the bathroom and in the kitchen, and then someone found him dead on the floor with his brains everywhere and looking for the bullet, and it all feels and seems so fucked up to me. That I could be kissing a boy who looked at me like I was sunshine and two weeks later, he puts a bullet through his skull and goes to sleep six feet under in a coffin, and it's like none of it ever happened and he never existed and there wasn't passion in the bathroom on the sink in the filth of it all. I cry if I cry at all because it is, it is so fucked up. He was just a kid, just a dumb kid, and now he's dead and I was in the moonlight with him three weeks ago and what does that mean anyway. Nothing seems real anymore. Nothing but the music and the museum sex, not while all the city's pawns are falling into caskets and somehow, it's all so incredibly fucked up. And I'm always burning love letters to dead boys in fire escapes, and I keep asking. What is love, do I know love, have I felt love, how will I know what love is or if I love and where does the road of love go? Over and over, and I don't know, wishing someone could tell me. Because I'm always on fire escapes burning diary notes to dead boys, writing songs that don't rhyme but weep with such an edge and a flare. Telling everyone in the world as if asking, please can somebody tell me what all this means because there's a dead boy somewhere on the floor and I want to know what love is, if I ever felt it or if I ever will, and if the boy with the algae eyes can see me now.
Hemodialysis three times a week, dietary changes, and several prescriptions on top of the supplements she was recommended were the things that were supposed to keep her healthier longer—and she was banned completely from chocolate on top of her usual plethora of drugs and alcohol, which kept her drowning herself in his sex for the releases from reality that she not only craved but needed. While there was no way that she would qualify for a kidney transplant legitimately in the States in time to save her life, luckily through contacts and plenty of research, her saving grace had been discovered. The woman's name was Damini Lyngdoh and she was willing to sell one of her capable kidneys for twenty-five thousand dollars through their third-party negotiator, his fee all-inclusive. Their round-trip tickets to India had already been purchased and now all they had to do was wait impatiently for September to come around, to hope that the poverty-stricken woman didn't change her mind, that the contraband clinic where the surgery would be performed wasn't shut down in the meanwhile.
Sometimes, she would have these horrible nightmares but the psychiatrist never understood how truly terrible they were. "That sounds disconcerting," he would say in his impressively modern office that reminded her off a checkerboard in black and white, pen tapping rhythmically. They weren't disconcerting; they were unbearable. She would dream that she was engulfed in this impenetrable darkness, a mazelike abyss, and Jett's voice would keep calling her name. Quietly, at first, as if she were hearing it from underwater and then it would start to clear up. Answering him never seemed to work because his volume would escalate angrily, demanding that she tell him where she was, and she would get pissed right back, screaming at the top of her lungs that she couldn't see anything and that he should stop playing these games with her, to quit acting like he couldn't hear her! Then he would sound desperate, this way that she'd never heard him sound before (that's what made it so terrifyingly real), and he would start screaming, so she would begin to feel scared.
Running through the blackness that felt as sterile to her as a hospital room, she was so afraid of tripping because she couldn't even see her feet or what she was standing on, and she'd start to cry only when he stopped calling for her — when it sounded like someone that couldn't have been him was crying, couldn't have been him because it sounded so weak and Jett was never weak. Would sob, and run faster, and would feel so overheated that she thought she would have a heart attack if she didn't wake up--so she'd wake up, covered in a cold sweat, shivering naked with her arms wrapped around herself. He didn't have to tell her what it meant. It meant that she was dying. It meant that she was terrified of going somewhere that Jett wouldn't be able to find her.
He had asked her one night, sitting in the stairwell of their New York City apartment building while smoking a joint of white rhino marijuana, if she could be anywhere: where would that be? Las Vegas. He had never liked their apartment anyway, and so after finding a new one, they'd spent an entire day saying goodbye to the former: smashing glassware and plates, shredding curtains with switchblades, plastered to the marble and stainless surfaces at strange angles where his cum would be left behind for someone else to clean up by the time they'd be long gone.
It was a city that honestly never slept and wallowed in sin, its neon lights glimmering like a twisted Milky Way amidst the desert. Their apartment was nice but not nearly so large, a loft space so open that secrets couldn't bear to hide. The newspapers spilled the news of her illness in bold headlines but there she could whisper to him in fierce, heart-shaped syllables, the clothes would come off, and they were perpetually locked in some slippery animalistic embrace that kept the impending threats of reality at bay. Jill was content with that: being naked and wet, her spine strapped to his chest with his palms roughly cupping the inside of her hipbones, breaths panted out from where they'd been fucking. There was nothing else.
His tongue. Her lips. His fingers. Her legs.
Diseases couldn't exist in places that beautiful.
la fête est finie on descend, les pensées qui glaces la raison.
Paupières baissées, visage gris, surgissent les fantômes de notre lit
on ouvre le loquet de la grille, du taudit qu'on appelle maison.
Protect me from what I want, protect me from what I want.
Protect me, protect me, protect me.
Protège-moi, protège-moi.
Sommes nous les jouets du destin, souviens toi des moments divins
Planants, éclatés au matin, et maintenant nous sommes tout seul.
Perdus les rêves de s'aimer, le temps où on avait rien fait
Il nous reste toute une vie pour pleurer, et maintenant nous sommes tout seul.
Protect me from what I want, protect me from what I want.
Protect me, protect me, protect me.
Protège-moi, protège-moi.
— Placebo
Dear Davidé,
You keep cutting me up with this hated knife of truth. You see, the truth and I lie very far apart: every time I taste a confession on my own shivering lips, I am drowning, jerked tight by the undertow until I can barely breathe. I cannot cry, Davidé. To cry is to surrender, and that I will never do. I know, I know they only kick you when you're down — and little do they know, one more stumble, and I think I should break completely apart, starting at the ribcage (the only thing that can hold my heart in, for otherwise, it would've surely run away from me by now).
I am as riddled with ugliness as a fire victim but I hide it under my skin. When I am touched gently, I swear to you that I have been slapped. I feel its undeniable repercussions, its sly poison. A mean screw in the middle of an alley, teeth disrespectful of a fragile-boned shoulder, hands that own another's hair. I find it far more trustworthy, this exchange between two people who do not care for each other, nor care to pretend that they do. A tender kiss, a whisper: this is the way of Judas, surely not your imagined Jesus; that is how the most dangerous murderers slip by the night, with a smile in front and a gun coming from behind. I will not be bought off with their blood money in the romance of a sweetly stolen moment. I've played that game before again, and again, and ..
Its the sword that you do not see coming that puts you down. I will stand tall proudly. I will see it coming. I will stab first, mourn you later. You will never have the best of me, or the worst of me — I think, sometimes, they are one and the same. I cannot let you. If you have that, if you have me, then I'm left with nothing at all. Can you imagine nothing, Davidé? I can. God, do I fear it.
I almost risked it all on a gamble placed desperately on a nameless man. Congo heat lover, brief friend, betrayer. There was something nearly intangible between us: it rose like thunder suspended in a flatland sky, a crackle of lightning, his sex the cool rain on my skin. A drink of dementia, this man to me. I could not wrap myself around the concept of it. I wanted him, fiercely and without any other woman's soft apologies. I wanted it all: his hands to drag across the small of my back, his worship at my temple, his wild love — until I remembered love. It is a conditional emotion that makes no exception for fear.
My need and he conspired until it was him that I would need. I said selfishly, "I love you," but withheld that with I could never put to words. I love you is fleeting, it can be said and just as easily torn away. I need you is forever, something you cannot take away no matter how hard you try. "I need you," and sweet Lucifer, how I did and would have him never know.
I need you was for all the nights I made hate instead of love in bed, left them while they slept and throbbed hollow in the hallways of my soul, hollowed out and wet and so damn cold. I need you was for all the times I was alone, whether willing or unwilling. I need you when I was so frightened, I wanted to slip out from this awful, pale body that would not move for him and beg for mercy. I need you was when I loved him and died over (and over for) it. I need you was for when I pushed him away and he went without a fight, because I was shrieking inside, "Come back!" and somehow believed he would until he did not. I need you was when he was my hope, and I did not want to lose hope.
I need you was when I slid into the bed of another man, not because I could not resist but because he did not need my broken, lonely love like I needed him. He brought flowers and poetry to my feet, not knowing I care little for cheap symbols of something lesser than this suddenly clumsy longing. Took my body to the floor and used its knowledge, starting a fire on the surface while I slowly froze inside knowing that he would never yearn for what I did.
He could not understand that my hands were trying to tell him something my lips could not. "Please stay," or "There is a vacancy inside I can't mend," or even "I need you to help me; I'm sinking here, I am rarely the strength you see me to be." Or...
"You cannot take away this light of yours. If you do, I will know nothing but the irreparable absence of you. You cannot leave me here alone with me."
__________________________________________________________________
"I will never be clean enough," she thought. "In bed when he's spooning me, I see the blood smearing the insides of my half fists and clutch them tighter to hide it until my knuckles bleach out. I taste it in my mouth and suck it back, wanting no one to see. I want to vomit as I recall the texture of it sloughing off my tongue and into the esophagus. I've killed people. I've taken life, I've severed the soul from the body of a person with all the clinical precision of a obstetrician cutting the umbilical cord from a newborn's navel. I've been told it probably doesn't matter that I've murdered those I thought might've deserved it, bad people, people who would hurt others; never nice people, never the innocent, but it's black-and-white they tell me. Grey was a phase that died out in the 1990's when a Republican took the presidency.
"The new-age Christians say God made one of his commandments about killing people, not just because it was wrong, but because it changes people. It tortures you like the betrayal tortured Judas when he ran from Christ, the devil's imps gnawing at his ankles. It dements you with the potential voices of those you've acted as God over. It's eating the wicked queen's poison apple. A part of the apple core, poisoned, gets trapped in your stomach. It spreads like cancer. It's like Styrofoam that the earth cannot absorb and that will forever live, just like this little piece of evil inside you. Show me how to turn back time, please. Exorcise the animal instinct in me, please.
"I want to be four years old now. I want to run after my father, know how to run more quickly, to keep up, to expect his absence and be waiting secretly in the backseat with Sam keeping me from harm in the meanwhile. I want that godawful house to go up in flames and I want my mother to realize that she loves me before I'm in my twenties, when she has AIDs. I want her to stop stripping, I want her to not be on crystal meth, I want her to not bring home the strange men to play prostitute for dope. I want her to play house and teach me the things mothers teach their little girls so I that I'd know how to be a mother today. I want to not be in the corner of my room clamping my hands over my ears, trying so desperately to not cry aloud, when a man comes through the door that I don't know and touches me in a place that makes me feel funny. Not funny nice, funny insane like I could wither and die immediately from a word that I don't even know what it means yet. (Like shame.) I want to not thank Jesus Christ and not thank the man as he leaves with just touch or two, and not more of me. Just a touch or two is a lot when you're four years old and you can't reach the cereal without a chair to stand on.
"I want to have both my parents love me, and if that was too much to ask, just one. I could've lived with just one. I want to've not been raped when I was a virgin in a training bra. I want to not remember what it was to feel like I had absolutely no control, that my life was a ribbon fluttering in the sharp divide of a pair of scissors, that someone jabbed a knife up between my legs and started to stab me all the way up to my heart then into my head. I want to not remember the alley in my hair and the gravel flattening my ass, I want to not know what it feels like to have a knife on your throat and an uninvited dick in you at fourteen. I want to forget the chaos of it, the despair, the desecration. I want that dead sleep afterward, the alcohol heavy in the dirty interior of my trembling stomach, when there was nothing, nothing at all. No memory, no pain, no fear, no hate. I want to not see Sam die, I want to not see his skull shatter and his brains fall out to hit the pavement before the rest of his body even started to collapse. I want to erase that from the log, make it not exist. Give him back to me, bring him back to life. Don't let me know what it was to be so alone. Maybe this is where we can start fresh. Maybe I would not be the person that I am today. Maybe I would be someone that didn't kill, and didn't hurt, and didn't consistently feel like something new within me is always dying.
"At times when I am at my most selfish, I think it's a joke when people cry because I've hurt their feelings. I've said something unsavory about them. I had slept with their boyfriend, or husband, tragically. As if that alone is enough to cry over. I envy that mindset, I covet that shallow water they wade through without ever quite realizing how shallow the water is themselves. I want those tragedies, not these. I don't want to be so fucked up, but I think it would take at least twenty more years of intensive psychiatric help to avoid having at least one minute a day when I find I can't breathe and I'm not even clearly comprehending why that is as it occurs. They don't understand me. You have to treat me carefully. Gentle. I'm the box that says: fragile; breakable(s) inside. Not that I think I deserve it, but otherwise, I become genuinely confused. I forget who the enemy is. I'm a snake, deceptively blind and sensing the threat of heat too close. I strike without logic, but instinct. I do it survive. I do it to live. I do it to salvage what's left behind after everyone else has had their way with me.
"Jett, hold me, I don't fear the dark only because I don't fear death. Intubation, sore trachea. Gastric lavage where they put a tube in your nose, feed it into your throat until it bottoms out in your stomach. At the same time, they had my hands on ice, were sewing thread into my wrists to pull the veins back together. I don't remember. I was told they put me on my side, made me throw up later while I was still unconscious. I tried hard to die that night. No one sent flowers. You don't feel sorry for the bad girl when she cries.
"I met him a month later. He must have noticed the scars, pink-soft and slow to fade, smartly vertical. He kept me alive. For the first time since my brother died, I was not alone. I can't have that only to lose it, not again. There's not enough left of my heart to withstand that kind of impact, I'll shatter irrevocably. I'll tear my fingernails into the white padding of the room they'll put me in until I find a way to bust out the flatlight fluorescent overhead, find a particularly jagged fracture of the hard plastic, indulge the jugular and start cutting until it all flushes red around me. I'll die. I'd have to, there'd be no coping with the kind of creature I'd transform into.
"Jett, save me, no one else can, they won't even try. You have to save me, please. Let your love be the tourniquet. Be my second skin, mine's so thin. I want to take you intravenously like junk, clog up all the weak spots with you. Help me stop killing, but don't tell me to stop, show me how, teach me the better way I've not learned. Please, don't laugh when it slips that I went to a cathedral with Queenie to kneel and thank God, if he exists, for you. It's the only time I've stepped into a church whose walls were not debris around me in my entire life and I felt a heaviness upon me as if even He didn't want me there, that I did not belong. Jett, tell God to not forget me and to forgive me. Jett, help me be a better person, I swear that I want to be, I do. Show me how. You're the only hope I have.
"Jett, never leave me. Jett, always love me. Jett, protect me."
Collapsing, her knees went up between her shoulders and wall of the shower she crumpled into, her chin draping between them as she convulsed violently as she wept. All those thoughts forced her humbly to a very real bottom, the undertow lapping at her throat, tears then cold water streaming over her with inkslick hair sticking messily to her cheeks and neck. Both of her arms went over her head, remniscent of the position children were to take in the nuclear bomb drills they conducted during the Cold War, and there he'd find her with her skin wrinkled from over-saturation. Perpetually waiting for him to fully understand what it was that she was, what she wanted to be, and what she feared becoming.
