Was it not enough to use me, to hurt me?!

Over and over. A fractured recording of the words played a distasteful soundtrack in her head. It spun out of control as soon as she hit past her bedroom door, dancing with a reckless warpath through the low lit domain dotted with snapshots of good times. And it continued to grow louder, with different verses, skipping over a convulsed melody that snuffed out all the different songs she could have remembered.

She thrashed through the shadows in a wild display of erratic behavior. Some kind of animal wearing a girl-skin coat of dawns own light. Savage, scared, caged to a corner of reality that didn't come with a key. Clothes were pulled off to decorate the cave dwelling of this new found creature, with glassy eyes and an open mouth that was swallowing air as if she might asphyxiate from the message he gave her. Half naked, stalking about while trying to get a grip.

To breathe deep rather than rapidly.

To use him. Use. Use, she knew about that term. She had been a putrid doll of that term, once upon a time. Long ago when she couldn't fend for herself and still sought some kind of soft hand from a vile monster incapable of mastering the true form of compassion. She had danced with more than one devil in moonlight, bloodlight, dawnlight. The waltz was etched into her bones to where she felt she was constantly vibrating to their needs, their wants.

How dare anyone assume the role of an accuser with her. To try to tear away her matyrdom with false belief. Endangering that fragile psyche, fragile as thin multicolored stained glass, to splinter deep enough to cut at the soul.

To hurt him. Hurt. Hurt, she knew about that label. She was positive she could speak that word in a thousand different languages, all ranging from verbal to physical interpretation. Splayed like a butterfly across the table for dissection would put the limelight on every lapse into the nightfall she had toed. A bit of sun that had spilled into all the black; even sunshine could die when the dark became too thick.

Falling to her knees as some washed up seraphim who had been missing her wings for a millennia; her life seemed to stretch to times she couldn't recall when being slammed up against the proverbial wall by the events of her past mixed with the events of the now. She had always been strong enough to carry the weight of a hundred worlds but now? Now she found that her backbone had dissolved, the tenacity to survive the storms gone with the wind that blew her down.

Losing the stoicism brought on the tears. Mashing the salted rivers into her cheeks, her chin, back into the liquid of her eyes with the heel of her palms. This wasn't worth it. This test of her will had not been a utility to climb mountains, to touch the stars. It hadn't come with a warning label or a handbook, only two pairs of eyes that had watched her since the trembling shift of ethereal to eternally normal. There was no prize at the end of this detailed conquest. Nothing but the reminder that she was the last of the untamed. The forgettable. Just a relic in a long list of fairy tales told to children.

It can be normal.

Fingers slipped, slid, and curved beneath the weight of the mattress, going elbow deep till they slid a long the familiar cylinder of orange. A plastic bottle that held the cure for her delirium. She had her moment with it, not too long ago; she recalled the way the pills rattled in the gut of it when she tipped it from side to side.

I can be normal.

Routine was coveted. Being mundane was better than being otherworldly. Her presence in this role brought more tenebrosity than it did lambent greatness. She felt more lonesome as a curator to an unseen realm in ruin than going back to the roots of her carefree beginning. There was a need to pick up the pieces in the broken kingdom of Hollywood than there was to patrol the Wall, to exorcise the Nothing from the great spirits, to play a double life as a brilliant smile and a tired pursuer.

And it would just take one, maybe two? Just a quick sip that would time warp her back to the days of nursing hangovers and a nightlife that came with neon light followers. She could resort to being fucked up for the rest of her life if it didn't mean having to care about the sting from sick tongues. If it meant deprogramming what made her a princess and returning to the land of junkies as just another pretty face to dismiss after a few nights of wrinkled bed sheets and broken bottles of vodka.

Her consequences didn't out weight what she proposed to herself as a good idea at the moment. There wasn't time to think about it, to put the bottle back and just wash away the tears, drink away the punishing regret of getting him hurt, sleep off the headache that came from a bruising struggle and not getting the last word in.

She popped the top, her hands shaking out of fear and excitement. Her old demons smothering the newer ones with victorious crows, rejoicing in the return of what had been absent for over a year. Two pills were shook out into the goblet of her palm.

Normal. None of this is normal.

Her thoughts couldn't become loud enough to overwhelm the recollection of minutes which kept displaying like a video behind her eyes. Get out!, he had yelled.

Popping them into her salt lined mouth, heaving with a wrenching of nervosa when they were finally swallowed.

Just one or two.

_________________________________________


Pupils are unresponsive!

I need 2 CC's of flumazenil!

She's going into cardiac arrest!

We need a ventilator over here!

How cold is it?

Whispers caught on the shell of her ears. Hundreds of them reciting the same line, a chanting question that spun across her skin like finger tips. Thin remains of ghosts that didn't belong here. She knew they were lost but so was she; any lantern of hope had been shrouded in the thick of the black that surrounded her.

Confusion wasn't an emotion that existed here. There was no fear, no terror. No guilt or whimsy. It was an empty vessel that she floated in that carried no actual currant of direction. A blip of another particle that once housed such a ferocious light was now wet to where the wick wouldn't light.

How cold is it?

No need to breathe here. There was no running rivers of blood to keep her skin ignited and her eyes lit. She tried to move but there was no instinct to make motion fruitful. Hanging in a suspension of gravity with no thin wires to puppet her.

How cold is it?

She felt the rustle of her hair across her shoulders. It slanted and hung in a twisted fashion; what color was her hair? Was it like a spun gold, or dried wheat? Did it feel soft when dripping between her fingers, or did it crackle with a brittle texture? And her eyes -- were they open or were they closed? A world developed in piceous ink that had not evolved with starlight or sunlight made it hard to gauge which one it was: Opened or closed?

How cold is it?

What did cold feel like in comparison to this? Did heat feel separate in a category to whatever this was? No recollection of her flesh becoming pimpled with goose bumps but she was puzzled with the murmured inquiry that kept breathing down her neck, against her face, near the blades of her hips.

How cold is it?

She didn't know. She didn't care. The concern seemed pointless to answer and even less helpful in the thick of things. So she listened for nothing in an aphotic tomb.

How cold is it?

I need you.

Need you.

You.

A gentle roll of a familiar voice fought against the thickness of the walls. Kept captive in a place of no time, no feelings, nothing. It tried to chip away at the bulwark of black, slipping between the cracks it had managed to craft so it could be heard better. Little louder but no less merciful.

She knew that voice. She knew it like she knew the backs of her hands or the crooked smile of the sun. Remembering it took a while (or as long as a while was here, seconds, minutes, maybe hours?) but a face began to be drawn out by the words alone. They shifted as Doppelgangers between smiles and frowns, tears and laughs. And there was recollection in the freckles that looked more like stars, or the eyes that heralded a hybrid lineage.

Terry.

All within the obsidian of this dead space came wisps of images that danced like multicolored smoke over dark water. Foggy illustrations of consequences, bad or good; a day in the old, old apartment that was the birth place of a shoe box, nights of strawberry parfaits that made their mouths alive, and the smell of copper, of rust, of worry and age deep within the rumor mill of a fight club. From one immortalized picture to the next, this vaporous trek down memory lane became faster, warmer, bright enough to shed light within the nebulous crypt.

As a fetus would in the womb, her figure was coiled together with compacted effort to keep as motionless as possible. Naked, alone, cold in a vault that suddenly felt like the depths of an ocean. Still, though, the portraits in motion fanned out in a wild performance of recognition and became like a thousand suns all rising through the sloe-somber serum that kept her deadlocked. The effigies reflected off her moon pale skin which once had been in the flavor of Helios, now sapped of it's color when left in suspension for so long.

And her eyes began to open.

Lips moved but were quiet. They did not give up; they moved again, and again, slow until the syrup of her catatonic state began to peel off -- literally. Layers of the alabaster shell cracked, piece by piece, to construct her as a living jigsaw puzzle. Bits of it flaking off to slowly sway, back and forth, in a descending journey to be lost in the nothing that the slideshow of recalled memory could not touch.

I hear you.

The utterance obscured, sounding more like a vibration than an actual coalesce of verses, but it evolved. It shook through the water as a time bomb set off, exploding in a rupture of force that endangered the stoic void.

She moved, sluggish at first, swaying her naked limbs through the frigid weight of the water. Unknown if she swam up, or down -- side, to side. Treading in the aqueous element that had kept her chained with the false comfort of feeling nothing. Rising, or falling; she kicked her atrophied legs and dragged her thin arms, shedding more of the bleached carapace as a butterfly might it's ugly cocoon.

Breaking through the surface in an outburst of a gasp. Thrashing through the undisturbed veil it had been hiding as. This sky was a triple moon nexus with a single rose-pink sun between the triangular shape they connected at. And the abundance of luminary dots that lit up like Christmas lights pulsed as if they were of one mind, one body, one atmosphere that reminded her of a home she had never known.

She reached. She reached as far as she could while still bobbing in the threat of a storm which brewed at either side of her. Those thousands of whispers, thousands of eyes; they came from the deep and seemed to scream for her to choose differently. To sway her into self doubt, into the guilt, into a need that wasn't necessarily for her benefit but had been the easy door to take when the world burned around you.

Further, further, she began to be pulled back beneath the trouncing upsurge of the churning waters. From beneath, she could look up. She could spy the wreath of moons and that idolized sun. The millions of voyeuristic stars that all seemed to light up in lieu of her plight. Finger tips the last to pierce the glaze of the surface.

This is best. This is safe. This is right. This is sad. This is lonely. This is wrong.

A hand broke through the bubbling of the undertow and slid through her palm, tangled fingers with her own.

And pulled her back to the sun.

__________________________________________________

"Peaches? Peaches -- you're in the hospital. It's going to be okay."