Where were you
this time
where were you
when I was on fire
and climbing
for the sun?
Where were you
when I was
everything that shattered,
everything brittle,
everything gone?
What I want
more than anything
is to take a breath
and grab hold of the sky.
Even now
I would
take you with me.
What if it isn’t really her?
It doesn’t matter.
What if it isn’t really him? It doesn’t matter, she tells herself. It never matters. It’s never mattered. It is him.
She can feel it.
Five…
I don’t know if you can hear me, but–
Burn everything you love
–I’m here. I’m coming. I’m coming home.
then burn the ashes.
She runs. She runs like a deer, like a blazing fire, like a river over shining stones. She runs for him. Those navy eyes light up amidst the dead gray of the world, the fuzzing dissolution of the edges fraying.
She’s pretty as a picture; she is like a golden dream…
Invisible hands reach out to touch, to catch. No warmth, but a pressure that is beyond familiar. The touch of a ghost, without the chill of the dead. I’m here. I’m right here. She is everything bright and radiant, and the world is alight with flame.
Four…
Something’s not quite right. He’s not looking at her — he’s looking at someone else, but she knows it’s him. She knows it’s him, no matter what. He’s still got his back to her; he’s looking at something, someone else. Someone else entirely. Something else entirely. Some. Thing. She can’t quite make it out, but she knows it’s wrong, and it could mean the end of everything.
I am calling, calling, from a place of longing…
The girl in front of him looks at him, blank and dead. There’s nothing inside her; she was emptied out, long ago. She doesn’t wear any accusation, but he can see the scars across her features as she regards him with burned-out eyes and a cut-out smile.
Three…
Behind you. Oh god, behind you, please. He’s looking at someone else, and she has to move harder, move faster. Turn around. Turn around and look at me. “Turn around and look at me!” she cries, finding her voice, a shriek of insistent notes, because she was always words and song.
This is how you remind me of what I really am
Even if it was fucking Nickleback.
Reaching out for him with her real hands, fingerless gloves, reaching through.
Reaching in.
The girl in front of him reaches, too. With cold fingers. People are giving her a wide berth. Can he see that? She is little more than shadow, a debt unpaid.
Her mouth opens wide.
Cheap shot; cheap fucking shot —
Wider.
Two…
He is standing within filament on the edge; there is a tear here.
Sugar we’re goin down swingin’.
She knows if she’s fast enough — here, he’s here, it has to be him here! “Open your fucking eyes!” she shouts, her teeth bared.
Now and again, it seems worse than it is.
Too wide.
But mostly the view is… accurate.
He is the mirror, a woman on each side of him, reaching.
“NOW!”
One…
She bumps into a passer by, long fingers grabbing a wallet. It happens eight more times before she feels like she’s got enough cash to fund food. Dumpster diving often finds a rather startling amount of good eats, but she’s hoping for real food, a real bed, maybe even real scotch. Wallets are dropped in various bins along the way; she tucks all the bills in deep, tight pockets. Now and then, she feels the pressure at her ribs, as though arms were around her. Now and then, she feels the warmth of his breath at her cheek, her throat. The heat of his hand at her–
She blushes, hotly, and bares her teeth in a silent snarl that is both desire and fury.
“Oi,” she hisses, and then laughs aloud at herself, shaking her head. For a moment, she is almost smiling, almost radiant. In another place and time, in another where and when, crossing paths every moment, she walks toward him, her steps fallen in time with his, those long legs and huge boots slamming against the ground as though she could grind the earth to dust and cinder.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” she murmurs. “But it’s bad. It’s bad, like edges unraveling–dark soaking in–folding up the here and now and then pulling it all back open, flaying it. I don’t know how it happened anymore; there’ some part of me that’s… missing,” she admits, frightened of the idea. “Dunno how it fucking happened,” she sighs, shaking her head.
Maybe he’ll never hear her. He hasn’t yet. He hasn’t in a hundred thousand lifetimes, but she knows he’s there, somehow. So close.
In that in between space, wasn’t he?
Weren’t they?
“I don’t know if you can–” And then her head tips up, cocks to the side. “Hear me.”
Her heart is no longer in her throat, but in her chest, banging, thundering, a bird trapped in a cage, fluttering wildly, out out out let me out, as she bolts, twisting to run, as though she can feel what’s coming, feel the call, feel the burn, feel the need, running, running, running like nothing else ever could.
Going home.
Everything was pain.
(Before the black night moves again)
She knew that, now. Everything was pain, and it had been pain, and it was going to be pain, forever and ever, amen.
She could not see him, anymore; her eyes had been burned away by his touch, but she knew when he came in. She knew he was there by the scent of him. Whisky and char, blood and cigarettes. She knew his touch, fingertips on her naked skin.
He had started by waking her, and when she realized she was bolted to the table, and her power came up, she felt the first searing heat of him. He took her eyes, and then her tongue. He took six inch swaths of her skin, and her fingernails. He took her left foot, and her right knee. He burned her and kept her sterile, kept her clean, injected her with something to numb everything except the pain.
He talked quietly to her, lovingly, even, and promised her that it was all for the best. Every single time the rush of her power came up, he burned away another inch of her, another swath of skin or another fingertip. She could smell hair and plastic, blood and shit; they filled her nostrils as though they were simply a part of the air of the world — she discarded them, as constants, and focused only on the new scents, the new stimuli that came, each time he came back into the room.
She didn’t blame him.
She didn’t ask why.
(She bends like a willow)
She didn’t beg.
She didn’t fight — not against him — and she didn’t weep.
One morning, when she woke, she had eyes again that could open, and she discovered she wore no collar, no chains. She could see the sunrise. She couldn’t smell him. She couldn’t hear him. She crawled to the top of the house and threw herself from it, slipping an instant before the ground, walking out of an elevator, skin still smoking, navy eyes wide, heart in her throat.
She had been singing, a moment before, and the note was caught on her tongue. And the flavor was… tart.
Where, what, I was, am…
Boots tripped her up, briefly, and she took a step forward blinking in the harsh fluorescent glare. The halls had a feel that was both homey and institutional; here was safe, and yet terrifying. Here, there be dragons. (No, those are different whens, different whos, different all the time except that it’s all tied together, these wheels within wheels.)
“Shut it,” she hissed, clapping her hands together, and the world shifted, shivered, and she watched herself, angry and alone, watched herself stumble and drop the pack of smokes. She watched herself have a day, a moment, that was never hers, and she frowned, running her hands through her hair. Was it braided? Beaded? Just curls? What color was the world? Her heart was in her throat when she saw him, not him, another him, someone else’s him, her own, that one, that her, that her right there that she wasn’t. That him belonged to himself, and strangely to that her, that angry, bruised, beaten her. She watched as he wrapped his arms around her and forced her chin up. As he tucked his body around hers as though he could shield her from what he was about to do. His lips at her ear. That snarl. “Stop. her.”
Past became/becomes present.
(Stupid, messed-up kid — just look at what you did)
She watches as the occupants of Rockefeller Plaza move through a dance she’s seen in nightmares a thousand times — the falling woman, her perfect swan dive, and the blue-eyed man drop bonelessly behind her.
“Another life,” she says, and the her that’s in his arms turns around and puts her palms in the bloody mess she made of her only friend and paints her cheeks, then pulls her hair out by the roots, screaming, “I can kill anyone I want. EVEN YOU. EVEN YOU!” The girl on the ground is so far removed from the woman watching her; the woman can’t help but take a step away, even as her face wears pity.
She turns, and bumps into herself, suddenly, and it’s then that she realizes she’s lost being solid. She’s lost the grip she had, tethering her to the here and now.
“Where was I?” she asks herself, and she herself looks disgusted.
“Fucked that right up, now, dincha?” she snaps.
She answers, easily, “Sod off, toerag.”
The two of them high five, and she tightens her grip, squeezing her other self to dust, just as booted feet touch down in the middle of an alleyway hot as fuck on a midsummer’s day. The ground wavers, because of the heat, but she knows it’s real, now. All of it is real.
(Somewhere, a music box is playing — the music box is playing — the music box is always playing.)
She starts walking.
“I’m coming,” she tells him, her voice a determined whisper.
“Not long, now.”
