carniverous plants

A Friend Of Inches, A Friend Of Mine

2008-12-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

[Only inspired by, not based on, actual experience]

When he wasn't home, I used his bathroom. I didn't get any particular thrill out of it, not really, it was mostly because his was so much cleaner than my own. My tiled floor, identical in size and color to his, was tainted a faint shade of pink from the dead strands of my colored hair that I never cleaned out of the grout. My clothes overflowed out of the hamper onto the floor and the door couldn't open all the way. My sink, the same vague shade of magenta as everything else in the room, was also stained with various pigments from paintbrushes and sponges that I really should have washed in the kitchen.

But in his bathroom, the floor was mopped each morning, the grout cleaned with a toothbrush every Saturday. The entire apartment was cleaned each Saturday. His brown floor mats, one in front of the sink and one in front of the shower, were laundered twice a week at the very least, and more if the white stripes on them began to look dingy. His black wire shelving that flanked the walls contained 12 copies of his video game magazine, in chronological order. Sometimes alphabetical by cover headline, it depended on the sort of week he washaving.

His shower curtain was ironed, though this ritual was one of the few done at his leisure and discretion, not on an inflexible schedule. His color-coordinated sink accessories- toothbrush holder, tissue box cover, water cup that remained unused- were exactly two inches apart and two inches from the backsplash. He washed his mirror each night after he washed his face, but before he brushed his teeth. There were exactly twenty-five disposable bathroom cups in the dispenser at any given time, as he replaced the top one each night. I explained to him once that this meant that the bottom twenty-four cups were never, and will never be used. He laughed.

The first few months of our living together I played pranks, as one naturally would in such an environment. While he was gone I flipped his towels around in the bathroom, so that the tags faced outward. I moved the accessories on his sink. I would put a few books on his bookshelf out of place, take them out of alphabetical order, or remove them from the category shelf where they belonged. I would take the candles in the living room and put the shortest one in the middle. I once hid the first Harry Potter book, throwing off the entire measurement of the fourth shelf in the left bookcase of our living room.

This delighted me when he came home, and of course immediately noticed each thing that had altered. I would stand, fascinated and giddy, as he scoured each room with his eyes to find what had moved, what had been misplaced. There were a few times when he touched or moved things that I had not affected. I never told him when that happened, I figured he needed to fix it anyway. He would laugh most of the time, treating it like some sort of scavenger hunt, like my way of saying welcome home, I missed you. It was all very playful, childish, ridiculous.

As the months wore on things became more particular. The pans and baking dishes had to be placed in a certain order, and he could tell by their sound if it was right. I was no longer allowed to do the dishes, as he could no longer be assured that they would be clean. Sometimes loads of laundry or plates would have to be done twice, to be absolute on their sterility. The sink was washed after each use, as was the stove and the counters. The napkin holder always held fifteen napkins, and I was wise to replace the ones that I used.

That was when the counting became forceful. The walking in and out of doorways, the flicking on and off of lights. The dimmer switches in the living and dining rooms made this particularly taxing. Doors would be locked and unlocked, faucets turned on and off. Listening to the sound of the shower being turned on, his feet climbing into the tub, climbing out, and the water shutting off again, over and over again, made me regret sharing a wall.

The floors became immaculately clean, as did the television set, the constantly dusted tables, and the polished wooden chairs in the dining room which we never sat in. Our apartment smelled like the laundry detergent section at the Food Saver, combined with furniture polish and cigarette smoke. The odor of his cigarettes began to bother him more and more as he tore across the apartment with cloths and sprays, but his increased stress only drove the butts to accumulate faster and in larger numbers in the crystal ashtrays on the porch. He dumped them every evening, and cleaned them out. He kept the butts in a bag in our closet on the balcony, filling it up quickly, but never dumping it out in the dumpster. I still don't know why. The place still smells like smoke.

As the year wore on I saw him less and less, while evidence of him grew exponentially. The apartment became a spotless warzone, as every gleaming surface only became harder proof of his degrading condition. I moved the coasters one evening to the opposite end of the coffee table within easier reach. The next day they were gone, replaced by a new set. I supposed it wasn't enough anymore just to move them back. I started just holding my glasses in my hands. I started using paper plates. I started eating out more.

I tried to talk to him, the times when he wasn't locked in his room and mumbling, and he smiled and laughed like always. We joked about how clean things were, while my room remained the great and terrible mess it always had been. He joked back, sarcastically commenting on my doors always remaining closed. My room and bathroom remained in the state they had always been. You could barely see the floor in my room, for papers, art supplies, clothing, record albums and books. My bed was unmade, my desk was unkept, and there was a thin odor of paint thinner, charcoal pencil, and the accumulation of human filth in unwashed clothes. We laughed at how we remained roommates. We laughed.

When I arrived that Tuesday to the blue and red lights flashing outside my apartment, it was only just beginning to rain. I was thanking God that it wasn't pouring, as I had to carry two large portraits, done in charcoal that remained yet to be sealed, up to my third floor apartment. I was hoping to go up and ask my roommate what was going on, if he had seen anything. He could never resist watching some sort of drama unfold in our parking lot. He once watched a drunk girl fight with a group of her friends for nearly an hour. He couldn't be torn away.

But when I got to the third floor, and my door was open with the thick scent of smoke and ash seeping out of the doorway, I thought maybe he wasn't home. When the police and fire department asked me if he and I got along okay, if he was nice, if he ever hurt me, I answered truthfully to every question: fine, of course, he never would. They asked if I had insurance, I assured them that everything valuable I owned I had with me. My computer, my cell phone, my diary, my car keys. Everything in my room and my bathroom? Nothing but clothing and those sorts of irreplaceable things-- photos, notebooks, paintings. A police officer came out of his room with a perfectly square box, taped up on all sides. Inside it were my two shelves worth of notebooks, photos of my sister he had painstakingly removed from the walls so as not to harm them, and the box that he knew, and only he knew, contained the broken fragments of a ballerina statue I had been given by my grandfather. There was no note.

His things were out of the apartment by the next day. I saw them moving out as I came by to gather the furniture from the living room, the pots and pans from the kitchen. His parents said I could keep the washer and dryer. I wasn't allowed to see him. They took the cigarette butts out of the closet outside and asked me why they were there. I still had no idea, as I had no idea until that very moment that there were over twenty-two bags of them out there.

They also found the coasters, I saw a police officer carrying them out on top of an already sealed box. I told them they were mine. He left them. I started to tell them more of his things were mine, or belonged to other people and I would return them. They believed me each and every time, even when I thought it was getting ridiculous. I think they were tired of going through everything and having to label it, number it, and catalogue it only to return it to his stricken parents. I kept a few dress shirts of his, perfectly pressed and creased like they were still in a box. I kept eight books, none of them in anything distinguishably less than brand new condition. I kept the mouse that attached to his laptop, his sink accessories, an unopened package of mechanical pencils, and an open box of latex gloves that I never saw him use once.

They didn't find a journal, some hidden files on his computer, or a note about why or how he did it. There was no evidence of his thought pattern, and pressing me got them nowhere. They insisted that I had been his best friend for years, I must know him better than anyone. I tried to tell them that I did, but not really. Knowing him was only talking to him, smiling at him, humoring him. The extent of our friendship was that we laughed late at night about nothing, we knew the sound of each others' key in the door, and I did not move his things. I knew what upset him and I kept back from his boundaries. I knew all there was to be known. We had an understanding, but I did not understand him. We were best friends, we talked every day, but in the last weeks of our interaction, I lost him. In the last day that I ever heard from the police, I realized I knew nothing about him.

They asked me that last day if I had any idea how he could have managed to only destroy the items in two rooms and nothing in the rest of the apartment. I told them he was very particular. They had not completed their investigation of the arson at that point, they had focused on clearing the space. I found out later that the wall that I shared with his room, the doorway into the hallway, the carpet that peeked beneath it, as well as the door, wall, and floor of my bathroom that flanked the hall, had all been coated with a special flame-retardant chemical he had bought from a chemistry graduate student. He had applied it carefully, with a very small brush. They managed to detect it with some sort of dye that turned the chemical bright orange. There was a neon-orange line down the side of every ruler they found in his possession. The box that he had filled with my things glowed like hot coals in a fire.

Stretch

2008-10-29T23:56:00.001-07:00

I look at my neck in the bathroom mirror. Turn my head side to side to watch the muscles extend. Run my fingers up and down the ventricles that beat under the skin. I look for a mark, a bruise, a scratch. I look for any proof of presence, a body of evidence. I check down to my collar bone, over the soft spot between it and my shoulder(my favorite place to be kissed, though I would never tell you). I stretch my neck upward and lean my head back- nothing.

Do I want there to be something? Do I want the capillaries to be bursting under the skin where your mouth lay? Where your teeth grazed over the flesh? Do I want there to be a print where your fingers laid? A palm shape left where your hands rested, combed, rushed over? Am I looking for the symbol of the moment, of the realization that it happened, that it was true? Do I want the physical demarcation of passion, of memory, some small fragment of some shared night that may never happen again?

Nothing.

I peel off my clothes to climb into bed, and I think I can smell you. But i've changed clothes, I've taken a shower, and I know that it isn't true. Do I know what you smell like?

This room is so quiet, the apartment is so cold. I dig myself under the blankets, tuck my toes under the sheets, and run my hands down underneath me to cultivated body heat. I turn off the light and there I am, in the familiar bed, soft sheets, over-fluffed comforter, soft light coming in from the parking lot outside.

All this time, and I'm still not used to sleeping alone.

Has it been that long?

I run my fingers along my neck again, feeling my heart beat through my throat. To think there's all this thick blood running through me right underneath this thin membrane, blood that's moving much too fast, blood that's weakened the heart, blood that travels to the limbs that travels to the brain that sends nerve impulses across the synapses to back to the heart that makes me think of you.

Think of nothing.

I used to be afraid to sleep in rooms this dark.

<3ashes

All I know is that you're so nice

2008-10-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

All she was thinking about was how much she didn't want to think about this. How quickly she fell into old habits, how those metaphors of drug addiction came so easily on days like today. She felt a little bit highschool, a little bit younger, like maybe she hadn't learned as much about herself as she thought.

How many times had she had to leave her feelings on rooftops? How many times had she tripped and willed herself to get back up because by god, that's what you're supposed to do. How many times had she whispered in some dark place "This isn't going to exist in the morning," and she had been right. How many times had she quieted the voice inside her that said "Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop."

She told herself feeling something wrong was better than not feeling anything at all.

She's pretty sure she's written this before.

She's been off the stuff for months. No hands, no writing, no kisses. Is that why she hasn't written? Does she have to be wretched with emotion to get anything onto paper? Does poetry only come from being afraid? From being unsure? From being lonely? Does the good prose only come from those drug-addicted places, those metaphors about trucks headed toward her in the street. Does the real, gritty self-expression only come from those rooftops or bedrooms or front porches or that overlook when you were 15 or the backseat of his car or the stairs where he walked away or that house that wasn't finished being built or the rocks or the river or those hundreds of millions of places where whispers were the loudest thing you could hear. All those places where she'd been, where she'd said those things and felt those things that she kicked herself for weeks after feeling.

She's being silly. Some days she loves herself for the way she feels, she loves herself for being so eager to feel, eager to hold, eager to make something out of nothing out of less than nothing

Someone told her once that if they could pick a superpower, it would be to control people's thoughts.

Some days she wants more than anything the power to control her own.

nothing happens here, that doesn't happen there

2007-08-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

So I asked him again, as that telltale smoke leaked through his lips just like always. "Do you think you could ever live without drugs?" Just as the time before, he did not answer, but stared at the wall as if it were doing some magical dance that only he could watch. I could see that he felt his words in his throat, but he pressed them down with the force of his inhale.

So I spoke not in questions, but in fact, "It will be me, or it will be drugs." He turned his eyes from the wall and followed my eyes. Tears were on my cheeks, coming to drops at the end of my nose and leaving spots on my shirt. I was begging him to speak, to answer. He asked me, "Please, sweetheart, don't."

"It will be me, or it will be drugs."
"Please, I love you."
"It will be me, or it will be drugs."
"I'm so sorry, I'm addicted."
"IT WILL BE ME OR IT WILL BE DRUGS."
"Please."
I packed my things in the car.
"Please."
"Have a good night."
His red, wet eyeballs leaked onto his cheeks.
I drove away.

<3ashes

how we spend our days is how we spend our lives

2007-04-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

"You think you'll every have a life without drugs?" I asked him, his hand shaking holding the pipe to his lips. He inhaled sharply, his cheeks indenting and his eyes closing while his eyelashes fluttered like wings. He passed the bowl to the next person, and exhaled into the open air. A few minutes earlier he breathed into my mouth, warm and wet, and I thought maybe I was falling too. I could see how easy it was to lose yourself in a haze of thick, sour smoke and milky thoughts.

He stayed silent, lacing his fingers through my hair. He looked straight at me, his eyeballs big, red and wet. He blinked and a few tears caught the edge of his eyelashes, he took his index finger and wiped them away. I looked at his hands, they looked too old for him. His fingers were wide and calloused from guitar strings and songs he learned from a monastery in France. He used to say that drugs didn't keep him from his closeness with God, so he didn't see anything wrong with it. Maybe I didn't either.

But maybe it bothered me because it felt like he was missing something. He thought there was something that life itself wasn't enough for, that I wasn't enough for, that even God wasn't enough for. He needed something else, something that made everything less real, something that made it okay to say things you didn't mean and never finish your work. Drugs were an escape and a great excuse. He could get away with anything.

He whispered, "I love you." I held his hand adjusted myself sitting next to him so that i could take the bowl from the person next to me and hand it to him. His hands still shook. I thought about hitting, about just letting myself float away to whatever world he was in, that they were all in. But that was a world of numbness and of giving up, a world of the unreal. I preferred the real.

"That doesn't answer my question," I said as he took another sharp, inward breath from the pipe. The lighter's flame was hitting his finger, but the high was worth a burn or two, he wouldn't feel it till the morning, "I asked if you think you can ever live without drugs?"

He exhaled again, deep and long, and the air in the room was slowly enveloped in gray clouds that hit the ceiling and fell again to run along the floor. He put his hand on my hand, and said nothing.

i know a place, oh i know it so well

2007-01-29T11:28:00.001-08:00

I underlined a line in my book before turning the page, and the man at the counter got up from his seat and took the one directly in front of me. I was surprised at his abruptness, but not uncomfortable or afraid. it was mid-morning at a Huddle House and there was nothing indicating anything particularly foreboding about the man. he was older, considerably so, with almost no hair and thick glasses. He smiled, a full-toothed white smile. I smiled in return, strangely serene.

"I wanted to say what pretty hair you've got, honey" he told me, glancing to my head as if making usre it was still pretty. My hair fell down over my shoulders, it was getting long, and almost matched the fire-engine red of my long coat. "Thank you so much," I replied to him through a broad smile. "My wife's hair was that color," he said, his voice dropping along with his smile, "Red hair has always been the most beautiful to me." I wondered if she had left him, or if she died seeing how old the man really looked. He wasn't repulsive though, he seemed to have aged in the way that Paul Newman had. He had lost his youth, but the dashing gentleman beneath the old face had not dissapeared. His eyes were wide and expectant.

"Where is she this morning? I asked, doing my best to be non-chalant. "She left me a long time ago," he said almost in a whisper, "Died the morning we were planning to see our great-granddaughter being born. I went, with the camera and the card, we both signed it, and I said she was too sick to come. Didn't have the heart to tell 'em with a new baby, waited a while for that. I haven't seen 'em really since then. Hadn't really seen nobody." I wondered how old that little great-granddaughter was now. How long it had been. How long he felt it had been. He reached across the table and touched my hair and I did not flinch. I let him brush my face, I may have let him touch whatever he wanted. I might have gotten up from that table right then and gone home with the man old enough to have a great granddaughter. The feeling of pity was so strong and sour in my stomach I felt like I was going to vomit. Loneliness was aching in this man in front of me, so much that he reached across dinier tables to brush nineteen year-olds' youthful cheeks. I wondered how many morning he was here, eating breakfast with his meticulously folded newspaper waiting for a young girl with red hair to sit down. Perhaps I looked like his wife.

We sat in silence for several minutes, until I glanced at the clock and saw I had ten minutes to make it back to campus for drawing class. I told the man thank you and to have a beautiful morning, and that he was very nice for talking to me. He looked at me with a content face, his smile returning wider than before, "You are a beautiful lady." I nearly cried, and walked away then to keep from doing so. I paid for my breakfast and waved at the man as I walked out. He waved back, revealing he had a wedding band tattood onto his hand. I hadn't noticed it, seeing as how I didn't think to look at his hands. But he had been young once, sitting in a tattoo parlor with his red-haired wife, kissing her lightly on the forehead as he had their ring etched into his skin. As I walked out and glanced back into the window, he sat staring directly where I had been sitting, pressing his thumb on his ring-finger, as if spinning a band that he had once worn, but long since removed.

we hold these truths to be self evident

2007-01-26T23:33:00.000-08:00

i told her, there is no shame in this. i told her that there were no directions for how to deal with this, no one could ever prepare anyone else for something so awful. i told her that there were certain inaliable truths in the world, and one of them is that you will never have to bury your child. if that truth ever turns out to be a lie, to be some sick coverup of nature to make itself look less menacing, you automatically recieve pennance for any of your actions. you should never have to choose your daughter's headstone. no child should ever have a eulogy written by their parents. there should never be memorials for children because children should never die. we believe this like we believe we will stay glued to the ground, that turtles are slow and snow is cold. anything otherwise is against all nature and reason and leaves us bewildered and lost in a world we once trusted, and now understand nothing about at all. it creates a pain inside that inhabits the very marrow in our bones- we bleed loss. we are asked to believe and we are betrayed.

she said, i hate to be a grown woman crying to a teenager.

i cried back and told her, holding her large hands, no one ever gives directions for this.

the bible didn't mention us, not even once

2006-12-09T02:22:00.000-08:00

she poured the pills onto the counter in front of her, counting them softly with the tip of her fingers. thirteen different little candies stretched out end-to-end along the edge of the counter. she remembered one night she had clutched that place, her heart catching in her chest, with a pair of arms around her that would have done anything to save her.

she felt sick.

each pill slipped down easier than the one before. quite a cocktail for this late at night, going down with milk instead of water. he poured her glasses of milk all the time, even when she didn't ask, even when she didn't want any. he did it because she liked milk, and he did anything she wanted and anything she liked. if it would make her smile, he did it.

she swallowed hard, a sour taste in the back of her throat.

she walked to the sink and put her glass down, the white color pooling in the bottom. she thought about dinners and notes he had written her. she had noticed he was writing poetry about her, for all the world to see, but this was nothing new. for him to be writing long, sick poetry about how he could never live without her was never anything new, he had been doing that before they ever were together. in fact, it revealed more about him than she ever understood.

she threw up in the sink, the glass falling over with the force of it.

she spit and cried, "god make him stop loving me."

"i'm begging you."

a saleman for misery

2006-11-27T22:41:00.000-08:00

it was all she could do to keep from falling to tiny parts, tinking lightly as they hit the ground like broken christmas lights. she held her hands tightly to her chest and begged god to make these things easier. she traced the bruise on her left cheek and contemplated her father. her wretched insides stewed and rotted. her face fell into her hands as water leaked between her fingers. the french girl beside her whispered, c'est la vie.

what a bitch.

monday morning

2006-11-25T21:35:00.000-08:00

we decided we would not speak. i told him that it would be better for him. i said i wished i could let him stay in the cabin over the weekend alone, but since it didn't belong to me i needed to be there. i said we would stay in different rooms and i would cook three meals a day and other than that we would be apart. and from the time we got into the car to the time we stepped out of it when we returned, we would not speak. we had hand signals for "do you want me to leave?" and "time to eat" and of course a nod for yes, and a head shake for no. i told him silence was necessary. for him to cope. for him to get through this. at that moment, the noise stopped.

by sunday the silence was normal. our footsteps sounded like strums on a bass guitar. our breathing sounded deep and heavy without any other noise. saturday night it had rained, and it sounded like bullets. when it stopped raining, around 4, the sky cleared and we walked outside to see the stars. out there, there were more stars than sky. we hadn't even planned to walk out together, we just ended up there at the same time. when you don't talk, its like your minds sync up. it only took us 2 days to do that.

monday morning we packed up. our packing was noisy and rough. we moved the couches back to the wall, closed plastic packages of chips and pretzels. the trunk clapped closed like thunder. he sat on the couch next to me and waited for me to point at the door, and give a motion for "let's go." but i didn't. he started crying. after the whole weekend, where i expected him to think and get past it, here the greif was seeping out of him from his bones. his whole body was bursting with the force of it.

i sat down next to him and still did not speak. i motioned for "do you want me to leave?" and he shook his head. i smiled. i pulled his head to my chest and let him sit there, wetting my shirt all the way through and shaking. once i felt the tears stop, i pulled his head up to mine and he started to say something, but i put my finger to his lips to hush him. i wiped under his eyes with my thumb, and kissed under each one. i kissed the top of his head. as i went to wipe a tear from his chin he kissed me. light on the lips. he put his hand on my face and kissed again. this time i kissed back, seriously and intentionally. it was strong and loud. it seemed i could feel his sadness falling out of him, reaching to the ground and pummeling through to center of the earth. it was the loudest thing that had happened all weekend.

once we got home we got back to talking. just as we promised, when we got out of the car we started with the words. we told our friends about how wonderful the stars had looked and how we made spaghetti and watched old movies. we looked at each other as best friends always had. we let the silence of the weekend remain over our monday morning love. that's what it would remain. it was never mentioned, but i could feel that his regret and loneliness was less.

for our years of friendship, every now and then, we caught each other's eye. we felt a kiss floating between us. we felt a good thing floating between us. but it was monday morning love, it was a silent monday morning love; it was how it was born, and it was how it would die.

staircases parkbenches

2006-11-22T13:07:00.000-08:00

2 cigarettes later he showed up, late in a joking way. i asked him if he's read it like i asked him to. he said yeah, he did and he thought it was real good. A real famous kind of good. he said he'd never read something so good in his whole god damn life. oh, i said, good in a joking way. he lit my cigarette and said no, good in a way that it made me love you. more? i asked. more, he said in little puffs of smoke. we smoked a few more and said nothing but breath. he said he had no idea my dad killed himself. he said it explained alot. i punched him in the jaw and stole his cigarettes. he was on the ground unconscious. unconscious in a joking way.

when they tell you love fades with time, tell them there's no such thing as time

2006-11-15T18:54:00.000-08:00

there are certain instances when you always know what time it is. when you're working, when you're taking a test, and when you or someone you know is having a baby. during these events, you never need to ask anyone,"do you know what time it is?". you know.

another is when you're thinking about someone you deeply care about but who isn't with you.

these are the times when you think if meaningful things to say to them. you have to stop yourself from calling them, from quickly typing a message into your cell phone and hitting send- with no intention other than to just let them know you remembered that they exist. you wonder if they know that you exist, if they ever think about you. because you can't get them out of your head.

you look at that clock. that torturous, number-faced creature. it taunts you. ever minute that ticks by is another where you're the place you don't want to be- without them. you go over work in your head, scrawl to-do lists and make phone calls to people you've needed to call. you wish they would call. you want to call, but all too often you feel as if you care too much, as if that one call could drive them away. you smoke 3 cigarettes. a man walks in with a shirt reading "CARPE DIEM". you light a 4th. it's been less than a minute since you last looked at the clock.

there are certain instances when you never need to know what time it is.

romantic desires as inconveniences

2006-11-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

"i don't think this is a good idea," she whispered, but his hand was already shaking above her thigh. he rumbled into the crook of ner neck, "i don't care."

it was all over.

it was nothing but hands then. hands and mouths and breath and bedsheets. she barely noticed the empty house or the rain pounding on the windows. the air lit on fire and it seemed the room was so much smaller than she remembered.

her eyes fluttered like wings and the clouds fell from the sky and skimmed the ground as humble fog. dawn creeped in the windows and her skin glowed with electricity. her head was laying on the pillow, her hands resting in front of her as if she was in prayer. she watched him. his soft hair and arms scarred with heroin. his chapped lips and soft chin. his hands were rough and his words were sharp, but she saw something raw and pliable within it all.

***

after that night she would go to the bookstore he so often haunted just for the chance to see him. every dark green car might have been him, ever time her phone rang he was calling back. she tortured herself with possibilities. she would stay for hours in the bookstore coffee shop, humming well written songs to herself and writing in her journal, hoping against all hope that the next set of headlights that shined through the window was him. how funny that you would be here. why don't we sit down and talk.

but she never cried.

she walked through the rain to her car the night before school started, picturing in her head him walking behind her and grabbing her shoulders. he would say he had been to afraid to come find her, but that he couldn't lose her. oh the wonderous feeling of having someone never want to lose you. she wanted to never be lost to anyone. but she made it to her car. she sat inside and turked the key. he was never coming back. even driving home as her hands shook on the wheel, she pictured him being in her room, lying beside her, whispering into the crook of her neck until they became just hands.

~ashes