Hanging out with this guy was like having your bowels cleaned out with steel-wool. He was stupid and arrogant in a way where the two traits fed off each other, creating a gross train-wreck of a personality. The conversational equivalent of being forced to eat a meal of well-cooked feces.

We weren’t friends. We were coworkers, who knew as little as possible about each other. We were strangers, set next to each other an endlessly long journey around the sun. We were bickering acquaintances on a sinking ship. We were lost, but we had each other, so it sort of sucked.

I dreamed of killing him, as you dream of anything which could be truly satisfying. Breaking his neck. Smashing his face in with a large stone.

As bad as he was, his friends were worse. Whiny dolts who rambled around like brain-damaged birds who couldn’t understand that they’d never leave the ground. Bad people. People I could hurt with a clean conscious. People who got it coming.

Some people, man. There’s just no helping them. 

“In the time of getting clean, I was junky.” 

She gave up on sex just in time to date me. “You got lucky,” she told me, not understanding what I was there for, “if you’d caught me yesterday, you’d have found me still a whore.”

“Yeah, that would have been a shame,” I said, sitting awkwardly to hide my erection in folds of my clothes. That bulge in my pants? That’s just the drugs I carry to distract myself from the way every day seems to feel. That’s just a weapon I have for in case of emergencies. Emergencies like you.

Yeah, she’s got the look of a house-fire in the night. Her eyes are like space-satellites falling to earth, out of the sky. Her skin is like a battlefield, a place where untold scores of unnamed men threw down their lives. Her life is like a lie, like a big long story, or a series of unfortunate cookies.

Her wisdom’s worth a fortune to me; tell me how to touch you, how to find you, how to fuck you in the dark. She likes body-parts and personalities. I like legends and samurai swords. 

We’re not just dancing, we’re dodging a much larger question. Slings and arrows of, lets be honest, pretty outrageously fortunate circumstances. 

So, here’s my story: she was trying to ignore me. She was out on the street, selling free love by the pound, and I had a receipt for services rendered. I was looking for a refund, for a chance to relapse. 

She took my karma in both hands, and blew me away. 

Bad thoughts are collapsing all around me; it’s like an earthquake in a book store, but all the books are my own; as they come cratering down around me, it’s my own words, raining down, reigning over… my own words reigning in me in. 

My computer’s gotten sick so I have to haul it across town in a cab to let some dull-eyed savant glare at it until it’s happy again. 

I have a story I want to sell you.
I have a story I want to show you.
I have a story I want to write for you.

But they’ll have to wait a while. There’s candy rotting in my belly, and bad dreams going stale in the breadbox of my brain. Molten waste stews and churns in my stomach, a sea of unhappy emotions and a scattering of refined sugars. I wince, and come up with something creative.

Somewhere in the future, the me, The Real Me, is looking back on this, and laughing. The laughter wakes up at night; distracts me from the worst of my dreams.  

She came into my heart like a house-fire; she burned up my precious possessions, my memories, the icons of my past. She burned and burned and burned, until my skin was ash on the bone. And then she burned the bones.

She said, “You scare me,” as she stuck her knives into my skin. She said, “I don’t know if I can trust you,” as she put a bullet to the back of my head. She said, “Do you still want me?” and then her hand went tight on my throat, like her fingers with the rope I was to be hanged from.

She broke my feet so I could wear her shoes. She broke my fingers so they’d fit inside her, inside her gloves. Yeah, she wrapped me in her gloves, like the empty grasping of her hands on my naked skin.

Reaching for something you can never hold.

She came into my heart like an unbidden burglary; she stayed, once she realized she could make it a home. 

It could be love; it could be something that feels like love, that floats like love, or that sinks like it too. Love is such a big, heavy, cumbersome thing. Love wraps around your heart like heavy metal chains, and it drags you down.

You’re like a drug I’m too scared to give up. You’re my favourite flavour of candy, my favourite flavour of something fake. You taste like a chemical spill in my mouth. You taste like the industrial age, getting ready to have sex.

Big clanking pistons and greasy spots. Ancient robots fucking to the sound of their own gears screaming. Ancient automatons pleasuring each other all through the day. Watch the sparks, watch for loose pieces of solder, falling from the sky like semi-solid sexual fluids. 

She reminds me less of a lover, and more of a nice way to die.