Neon lights in the rain.

Candy coloured girls, blinking like little birds fluttering their wings. 

I’m sitting here, alone in the world, alone in this city, the last thing alive between here and the moon, and I’m waiting for you to get back to me. I know you’re still on the other side of the world, but I’m waiting for you to get back to me. I’m so fucking bored and lonely and masturbation just isn’t the same when you’re not talking to me.

I’ve been flirting with your friends, out of boredom. I’ve been flirting with your friends, out in the front room. I’ve been flirting with your friends, or at least they seemed like they knew you, or maybe they just smelled a little like you when I stripped them down and dressed them up in your bathtub salts and soaps. 

Dressed up and scrubbed down. Filthy little creatures, they got under my skin like a disease. They kissed up like new employees caught doing something wrong. Yeah, your friends kissed my ass like they wanted to be my friends too. 

But I was just waiting for you to get back home, I was just waiting for you to write, I was just waiting for to notice that I was still here, waiting for you. 

Signal your frequency into noise?

“I guess what it is that I don’t like about you, man,” I said, sticking the scissors in, “is that you don’t seem very jaded to me.”

He says something against the duct-tape that covers his mouth. It sounds like “mmm”, but urgently. 

“You don’t seem like you have very discerning tastes when it comes to choosing your sexual conquests,” I went on, watching his blood flow around the metal, and down his shirt. Such a pretty shirt. “And I get that. I’ve been where you are, I think. I just… made different choices. Became a different person.”

His skin is going pale as all his inner self just leaks away through the hole I put in him. His eyes are wide, and unfocused. He looks dizzy, tied to that chair.

“Ah, maybe I was never as capable as you anyway. Maybe you’ll always be something which was, I don’t know, better than me?” I pause, and sort of laugh. “No. No, you know I don’t believe that. You’re just better at different things than I am. That’s all. We have different skill sets. And yours, just happen, to set you into direct opposition to mine.”

He struggles, wiggling the scissors in his abdomen. 

“I want to live a good life, in a fun and engaging world. And I’m afraid there’s just no room for you in either of those things.”

I pull the scissors back out, and a little spurt of blood shoots out across the room. He slumps over in his chair. 

“I don’t think of us as her ex-boyfriends,” I explain, “not exactly. I prefer to refer to us as Past Boyfriends. We were real at one point. And in the past, we always will be.”

I put the knife up to his throat.

“I have to admit,” I told him, “you remind me a lot of myself, when I was your age.”

Barrel to the back of the head. 

“Thing you need to know though,” I explained to him, “is that I wanted to kill myself when I was your age.”

The blade dips against his skin.
A slight sawing motion will open him right up.

Finger on the trigger.
A tightening, a twitch, will open him right up. 

“Not because my life was shitty, or because I was sad.” 
My voice is tight as I try to explain myself. I’m trying to be exact.
“But because I fucking hated myself. I hated who I was.”

He doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know anything about me.
But he’s close enough to me,
Close enough that I just can’t suffer him to live a bit longer.

You wanted me to write about you, and I wanted me to write you in as well; I wanted to write you in like an extra character, a soul without a role yet cast.

I was thinking we could just haul you up onto the stage; I don’t really care what instruments you can or can’t play; you can just dance if it comes down to it, and if you can’t dance, then you can just twitch. You can just sit there, twitching on the end of my 

song.

I was thinking about your skin, the shade of it fading out from your eyes. I was thinking about the bits of you that you hide under clothing - I was thinking about the bits of yourself you hide by keeping them outside of the frame of the photography. 

You remind me of how I’m cursed to always get what I want; I think I want you, but I know I want you to want me. 

I want to see you; not as a person, but as us, as a confluence of forces coming together. 

I’d love to see us as a confluence of forces,
Coming together.