We’re laying around her apartment, smeared in sexual fluids and melted chocolate. The secret police are arming-up outside, and readying themselves to take us by force. 

“All I’ve ever wanted,” she says, staring out the window as she puts a cigarette out against the eyeball of one of the high school jocks she brought home for the warm-up, “is to watch this city burn, like sand melting into glass.” 

We’re living in the moment, now. Not worrying about the past, which is full of cavemen, or the future, from which we’ve stolen jet-packs. 

Me, I’ve been eating candy for days. I’ve got guts full of gummy worms, all twisted into knots. I sweat artificial colourings, and I poop pure, refined white sugar. Ants follow me wherever I go, feeding on the leavings in my wake.

How much longer can we keep going like this? What fuels us on? What motivates us? What keeps us on the road, or in the sky? Is it all just a sugar-high fuck-fest above the clouds? Or is there something more to it all? 

I don’t know. I’m slipping into a dream-like state, where everything’s glowing, and shimmering, and bright. I feel like I’m being knocked, face-first, into the fire. 

But really, we’re just waking up on a Tuesday morning. With stuff to do. 

She had tapes and tapes, old black video tapes, piling up in the back room, of Spider Snuff; hours and hours of arachnid copulation that ended, inevitably, in the death of the male just after the point of orgasm, or whatever spiders did when they got off. 

“They’re my favourite sort of love story,” she explained to me, watching me squirm uncomfortably in my chair as I watched the spiders squirm uncomfortably on the screen. “The kind that ends in cannibalism.” 

All love is a form of cannibalism; I read that once, somewhere, in some book about romance and mystery. All love is a form of consumption; devouring something, consuming it, taking it in, taking it on…

Yeah, the back room is full of things nobody wants to know about. Shirts with strange stains. Underwear that’s been worn a little too long. The hollowed out shells of giant insects that ruled these lands back when humanity was still a distant dream of tiny, cave-dwelling prototype mammals. Big, hungry bugs, that grew monstrously large on the oxygen-thick environment of ancient earth. She uses the shells as ashtrays, and lousy conversation pieces. She loves a lousy conversation. 

If you became a hero, I’d be a villain just to clash against you. If you ever choose to be cymbals, I’d be drumsticks. I’ll rattle you, splash hard against the solid of your surface.

If you ever become a vampire, I’ll wander over to your home in the dead of night, nothing but broken crosses in my pockets. I’d put my heart into your hands, and let you suck me dry. 

If you went out walking, I’d follow you around like a cloud of mosquitos, buzzing in your ears and supping on your bloods! I’d never be able to leave you alone, and I’d wind up flattened against the palm of your hand. I’d be the goo between whatever immovable object you, the unstoppable force, came into conflict with.

“It fucking hurts to love you; or at least, it should.”

You smile in that way that suggests that you don’t even notice that I’m here, and I don’t blame you. If I were you, I’d have trouble seeing a world outside myself. If I were you, I’d probably arm myself with guns and knives, and go out burning and raging against imperfections like mankind and all their shitty little societies. 

Fingers on triggers, on pulses. Listening for bombblasts and secret omissions; the kind that lovers make late at night when they’re exhausted but still too fixated on each other to stop. 

I’m still too fixated on you to stop. 

I said it hurts to love you, but love isn’t a regular thing like pain.
Nah. Love comes when it wants to. You know what they say.
Love comes, in spurts.  

The tricky thing is, I don’t want to fuck her. I just want to watch her, fucking me. 

Yeah, she’s fucking me, over and over again. She’s fucking my head, like she’s armed with a hammer and fistful of nails. Big nine inch nails; I let her do it to me, so you can call me Mister Self-Destruct, if that means anything more to you. 

Yeah, she lays into me, slays into me, like I’m a gas-station-robbery gone bad. She shoots my witnesses and she sets fire to my evidence. She pauses to shoot pornography on my security cameras. 

She’s a tricky thing, like a tiger-trap on legs. Yeah, you follow those legs, and they’ll lead you to a long dark pit, and you fall into that pit and you’ll wind up eviscerated upon the long sharpened spears she keeps within it. 

The tricky thing is, I don’t want to want her. I just to watch her, wanting this.

Her heart trembles in my hands, like the wingbeats of a little baby bird. 

I’ve been in love with self-destruction for so long, it seems like we’ve always been together. Her teeth in my throat, her drugs in my veins. I call it her; self-destruction has always felt like a feminine force in my life. 

She’s in me, she’s of me. She’s in the heart of every fire I light, she’s in the cold pit of silence at the centre of ever shot I take. She smiles like a bullet in the heart, and she speaks like a slit throat sliding open.

She takes her time with me, killing me like cigarettes or a bad relationship. She puts ground up glass in my belly, and she wraps barbed wire between my teeth. I spit her name when I try to speak; I spit her name in blood on the floor.

Here’s a little secret about me that’s true:

I don’t think fire’s as beautiful of smoke.

Make of that what you will. 

She realized a day too late that she only existed in my imagination. She was just letters on a page, I was pretending was a real girl. She was just a masturbational fantasy that’d grown depth and weight and gone off to rent an apartment and start dating and marrying boys I’d never approve of.

She was perfect for me: that was the first warning.
She appreciated what I did: that was the second.

I met her online. I met her in a park. I met her in a book, between a couple of pages that’d become stuck together with sweat and runny inks.

She said she wanted to be a real girl. She thought she wanted to be my lover.

She chopped off her hands and she mailed them to me as a gift. She invited me into her home and stripped naked so I take everything I wanted while her boy slept in the other room. I’ve never had a problem with that. Not since before I was a virgin.

She wants to be real.
She wants to be mine.

But she’s gotta pick.
It’s one, or the other.