I was waiting for your letter to come… but it didn’t. 

Oh sure, I got that blood-stained valentine you had left-over from the third grade; the one Angela Tooksburry gave you. Am I really as empty as an art studio? I thought I was full like a big fat guy at the breakfast buffet. But full with such emptiness, as things are. Me, I’m full of smoke and bones, mainly. 

I read what you wrote on the walls, and my answer is No. You should’ve phrased it more delicately, and not just scrawled your phrasing a half-inch deep into the drywall. You should’ve taken a deep breath, and composed yourself. You shouldn’t have crossed the t’s with pig’s blood, because it never looks right when it dries.

I was waiting for your letter, your explanation, your manifesto that you were going to squeeze into my brain through my eyes, or maybe just down my throat. Make me eat your words, and maybe choke a little on the tongue, too. You’d like that, I bet. To hear me choke on what lovely things you have to say. 

Fuck it; this isn’t for you, or her, or anyone. This is for me. This is my mirror. This is my reflection gaping back at me. This is my beginning, middle, and end. Omegas and X’s like fuck-you’s and kisses. 

Breathe easy. Or don’t breathe at all. See which you notice first. 

Hers was a heart of candy; rock hard and sweet. Her heart was as hard as porn-stars erection, and twice as dangerous… it too lived for penetration, and loved to spurt its juices all over the things it claimed as its own. Her heart loved in spurts, spurts of blood like sticky syrup, all over your face and hands and running down your body like lies. 

She had eyes like the sun; big - too big - and burning, always burning. 

She said something erotic like, “I want to fuck you with a fax machine until you’re coming hard electronic noises across the carpeting.” She said something threatening like, “I want to eat out your soul and spit it back in your face. I want to tear your soul from off your naked body, and use it to fuck a stranger.” She paused, and looked at me like I was ice cream melting in her hands. “I want to shove your soul so deep up inside another person that it hurts until it feels good.”

She laughs a little liquorice whip; a tiny lick of hot red sugar treat. 

Her mission was one of total dominance. She wanted to ruin the world and feel it crumble in her hands. She wanted to love me until I broke. She wanted and wanted and wanted, day after miserable day. 

She had to get up awful early in the morning to get all that wanting in.

Her heart, candy though it was, sometimes ached from it all. Satisfyingly so, even. 

We were still in bed when the cops came for us. We were still naked, and eating jam by the spoonful. 

They said we were criminals. They said we were bad people. I said we were just hungry, just hungry and looking for some place to lay down for a while. 

The mattress under me is soft and squishy. It’s full of sex and blood and other runny bits of humanity. It’s like sleeping on a waterbed full of foam. 

The walls in this place are shot through with bullets and disinterest. The whole place is falling into disrepair even as we watch; wallpaper sliding down the walls, plumbing leaking brown waters onto the floor. 

The cops come stomping up the stairs in their big black boots, their guns in their hands and their mouths full of commands like “cease and desist” and “freeze suckers” and “don’t you fucking move”. They love this bit; running up stairs and kicking down doors. They look like a troop of soldiers on the warpath. 

She drops a match into a bucket of gasoline even as the cops hit our hall, and we’re out the window and onto the fire escape even as the force of those authority figures comes barreling into our home. 

There’s an explosion of warm air, and then we’re loose in the air. I can hear the sounds of bodies, cop-bodies, frying in the midday sun, frying the inferno we left behind us like footprints of angry destruction. 

She holds me, all the way down. Her voice in my ear, her hands down my pants.

We were trapped in a machine, a box of living words. 

She was born to fiction. She’s never known what it’s like to really be alive, to be something that pains and ages and changes with time. She was born as a book; her life was omnipresent, written down from beginning to end. She was just living out the motions, the moments, of the page you turned to.

She was beautiful and scarred and newborn and dying of old age, all at once. She was lustful, always so lustful. Eat more, see more, fucking more. She wanted to experience everything that was life, even if it wasn’t hers.

I came to her because I fell in love with her idea, with the concept of this girl, out there, in here, somewhere. I fell into her world, I tumbled headlong into her words. 

I got stuck in there. Stuck on her, stuck with her…. 

Love, I love you, like I’m on fire. Like I’m self-immolating, like being with you is like setting myself on fire, every goddamn morning.

Yeah, you look into my eyes, and you strike sparks across the surface of my deep, deep ocean of fuel. A lake full of gasoline, bursting to life with an angry cough. 

Lover, I love you, like drugs in my mouth, like razor-blades love cutting up lines of thin white powder, like needles love veins. Lover, I love you, like I love pain and heartache and lies. 

You’re a dancer and a deceiver. You’re a short walk to some place bad; you know where the rapists hide in the park, where the tiger traps have been set up in the city square. You’re the bomb on the plane, you’re the poison in the cup of fruit salad. You’re the carpet-tack hidden at the base of the condom. 

Love, I love you.
I love you so much, I’m going to let you put an end to me.

God, how long have we been watching this movie? Is this a date, or a prison sentence? 

Okay, so I woke up early this morning, with a girl I didn’t recognize, dying in bed next to me, dying from boredom and disappointment.

I rolled off the mattress quoting song lyrics like I was in a music video nobody else could see. You were my camera, you were what I was walking and talking into.

I walked into the bathroom and I urinated and pretended to comb my hair when I was really just admiring myself in the mirror. My face reminds me of a book of love poems; I don’t really know why, but it just does. I stick out my tongue and I stick out in a crowd. 

I want to spit in the camera, I want break my face on the fourth wall. 

I want come, willingly, along with you, into the next chapter. 

I ran my hands over the bumpy green skin of her back. “What’d you want to be when you grow up?” I asked her.

Her violet eyes sparkled like daggers in moonlight. “I want to be the last person standing, when it all burns down,” she said sincerely. “I want to be the one who wins.”

She’s got sixteen fingers; a spider on each hand. She’s got teeth that are sharp and twisted like carpenter’s nails, and a highly defined sense of smell, like a carpenter ant. I’ve got a bad attitude, and nowhere else to be. I feel sort of sad and lonely and bored, except when she’s around.

“I want to fall in love with the last man on earth,” she said, “and I want to kill him. While we make love, for the first time.”

“Would it be the last time?” I asked grimly.

“That depends on how lonely I was,” she said, and she smiled a smile at me that told me that she’d never be lonely; never be lonely enough to spend time with me in the way I thought of us as being able to spend time. 

Yeah, she stuck the blade in, and broke it off. She fornicated that way, she fabricated that way, which is to say, she manufactured fictions. Stories, you know? Little lists of words that form out ideas.

There was a girl; her name was a word I hadn’t heard before. She lived on an unnamed street, in an unused part of town. Her home was inside one of those great big industrial processing plants that was in business for about ten minutes before it got shut down for some obscure legal reasonings.

She slept on the ground, under a blanket of broken glass. Her best friend was a half-blind rat, who told her lies about tomorrow’s weather, like some sort of a broken handheld electronic device.

Her skin reminded me of a rainbow under black-light; imagine if the sun turned inside out, and started eating more light than it produced. Imagine darkness like inky water, shadows as thick as the sky. You’d need a nuclear device to tattoo her, a diamond drill bit to pierce her. I don’t know what you’d need to love her; a hard heart and condoms cast out of iron. 

Feral little cat,
Eats scraps from my fingers,
Takes a little bite too.

Feral little cat,
How much I gotta bleed,
To make you happy? 

She spoke to me like I was supposed to break apart in the rain, like castles made of sand drifting into the sea. She spoke to me like I was disposable lover, something she’d fuck until the batteries were dead, and then leave for the maid to throw out in some roadside hotel. 

“Next time you shoot the little cops first,” she warned me. “They’re the ones with something to prove. Past that, it’s from smallest moustache to largest.” She’s got all these little codes of conduct. “White wine with vanilla ice cream,” she lists off. “Unmixed gasoline goes to the right, and that shitty homemade napalm is in the jugs to the left.”

She puts her hand in mine, and it’s cold as stone. She looks at me, and she’s evaluating how many bullets I could absorb if she was crouched right behind the wider parts of me. She doesn’t have to hide it. She’s not likely to.

“I’m in love with you,” she tells me. I remember when I said that to somebody once. It fills me with one of those oddly places sense of, lets call it, regret.