I forgot how often you used to slip into the champagne room behind the visible spots in my irises. You would ask me to dance, and I would laugh because I had always been afraid of stepping on other people's toes. You taught me that a little pain is sometimes better than no feeling at all, and I took that to heart.

My chest has never ached more, ever since you planted that seed in the garden I had been saving for the past three thousand seventy seven days for someone I believed would come to me in the form of a prince in a gleaming pumpkin chariot. It was that afternoon eight years ago that I decided I would wait, whether it be in a tower covered in thorny vines or asleep and guarded by a dragon the size of Mars, for someone to save me from the fantasy created in my own mind. All that time relying on fairy tale love stories vanished in a moment of betrayal like an antique grandfather clock tumbling down flight after flight of stairs.

The sound was like that of a mistreated music box, like the one you gave me as a gift for our last day together, or at least one that was happy. I thought it childish then, but I suppose it was fitting from the way I regarded you unconditionally. I should have grown up faster, but you helped me through it quite effectively. I just wish you hadn't absconded from the scene with a stolen innocence you didn't deserve to have. I like to think you keep all of them, the naïvités, the wonders, the trusts you stole from girls, in glass jars lining the windowsills in your bedroom.

You never allowed me even a peek inside, after all. I always wondered what you kept in there. Sometimes I feared there was another girl, bound and gagged and rolled beneath the bed like a doll made of flesh and hair and bone that you could only take out and play with on certain occasions. Other times, I believed you were the tamer of great beasts, and housed illegal Bengal tigers and pronghorn deer in specially fabricated cages among your dresser and nightstand.

You did have a way with your words; I would know. Your voice wasn't quite poison, but tasted like peppermint schnapps on my lips and whiskey on my throat. I was afraid to taste when you first led me away from the bustle and noise of public life, but I soon became alcoholic and revered the high I was lifted into upon your smiles and the sight of your jawline silhouetted against the light of the rising sun filtered through thin white curtains on a cloudy day.

Coming down from it was a sudden and excruciating crash I haven't yet recovered from. I was left in a pile of ripped clothes and broken bones and organs that had burst with the pressure of the altitude I had just tumbled so unceremoniously from. Everything is a mess, both figuratively and literally.

I cannot take any time to clean any belongings. I dig through the growing pile of laundry in the middle of the floor sometimes, searching for any hint or whiff of you. The smell of mint and liquor, a nicotine stain from your chain of cigarettes, a rip in the hem if a shirt you liked a little too much: I would hold that bit of fabric, so irrelevant before your being entered it, with less than a memory and worship it until the smell faded, or the stain rubbed off, or the rip widened with my worrying and resembled less a bit of the scar on the edge of your thumb from when you cut yourself cooking dinner for the birthday and more like a rift in my lungs that leaves me wheezing at the slightest thought of you. An ache in my rib cage that won't go away gave away that little injury. I lost my breath in the folds of fabric a lot after you left. I'm afraid of washing any piece of clothing I wore in your presence for fear if washing any of you away.

I can't blame that compulsion on your lacking in my life, though, for I practiced this long before you even noticed me. A brush in passing, a shared glance in a crowded room, would force me to stuff that outfit out of sight in the back of my closet. I was still so afraid of your toxic smile, I would only allow myself even a quick peek at the clothes in the dead of night, when even my conscience was slumbering. Fear of insanity and of your reputation kept me safe for long enough, but I was already gone when you took initiative and approached me two hundred and sixteen days ago with a hidden offer of escape tucked behind your ear. You were exactly what I was looking for.

But now I realize I am not grateful for you saving me from myself. Although it was what I desired for longer than I have been logical, I've realized since that I have to save myself.

No longer do I keep ***** clothes on the floor. I need things to wear in my life, and I can no longer use that as an excuse to stay home mooning over a lack of even blurry pictures of you. I am no longer a lingering drunk, so I no longer stumble embarrassingly down the street as my old friends stare on sadly. I am independent and I always have been.

The only thing I can really thank you for is bringing me to realize that fact. I cannot even thank you for the adventures you took me on because you abandoned me in a trip to the atoll of islands you claimed had been your home in a past life. I had to fashion a raft out of bamboo and palm leaves and vines and reeds to escape, and on the journey home, I found a piece of myself I should have discovered long ago.

I'm starting to see that you hid it from me to keep me loyal. I can't say I hate you for that.

You drew people so close to you, and that was what I loved. You could tear away something as if it was in your way and begin to know them deeply, not like the others. Perhaps that was why we all loved you so.

But when I tried to get even a but closer, to be as special to you as you are to me, you held those other people so close that I wasn't able to move them either way, to worm myself in.

And I know you can't control charm; I know it's simply got to be used and you can go through life attaching people to you that you don't want. (Oh, God, how I wish I had that attribute as well.)

I don't blame you in the slightest. I only blame you for kissing me on that warm night in May. I suppose it was the golden flute if champagne that did us in.

I was drowning before I knew it, whether in salt water or wine i still cannot decipher, and you strung my awe-stricken corpse over underwater graveyards while you sat above sea level on your luxurious yacht, playing with your new choice. I like to think you still retain those emotions behind your looks of love to other starvelings like me, though.

I want to warn them against your deadly elixir, but I've found you stole my voice as well as my state of mind. I wander in the barren plains you left me as a kindness, searching without reward for my belongings. I fear I will never recover them.

She was the girl he watched
all through the winter
with her hair sprinkled with powdered sugar
beneath the red and green
of the holiday.

She was the girl who noticed him
finally, when the sun melted the snow
into running rivulets in the grass parks and forests
along the edges of flower beds
and picnic blankets.

She was the girl who lured him in
with lips parted like a flower blossom
and hair like the April showers that pounded
the roof above their heads
as they cuddled til 3 am.

She was the girl who threw him out
when summer boys became an abundance
and he tumbled into the gutters with the dried weeds
and lay there all through the summer
wondering where he went wrong.

I could tell from her silence
that she wasn't fit for speaking to many people.

I could tell by the way she shakes
that she hasn't gotten much to eat recently.

I could tell by her sleeves slipping back
that she wasn't always shattered there.

I could tell from the ink on her hands
that she was always in a world she tended to invent.

I could tell from the way she rubbed her eyes
that she was forgetful of the black rimmed there,

and I could tell by the black
that she wanted nothing more than to be beautiful.

I could tell from the fault lines across her forehead when she wrote
that it was what she loved most of all.

I could tell by the cover of almost torn from her notebook
that she took it with her wherever she went.

I could tell she searched for love
but I could tell she was afraid of finding it.

Everyone always speaks of tragic love with such reverence. Something about two people so infatuated with each other that they drag each other under the surface of breathable air where others float freely intrigues readers and watchers and listeners so intensely, and has always done so. Perhaps it is the notion that they are faring even minutely more skillfully in the ocean than those they study. Humans, as a rile, tend to enjoy coming out on top far more than remaining at the foot of the heap. But, ******, I don't want to crawl my way to the peak if it means I won't have to fight and scrabble for breath sometimes. I want to cling to someone so tightly, I begin to lose breath even before my mouth and nose permeate the water. I want to live a tragic love, even as they warn me against it, because despite all the struggle and the pain in the deepest reaches of my lungs and the bruises on my throat and limbs and torso from flailing limbs, I will drown anyway without someone's neck to tuck my nose into.

It seems so hard nowadays to persuade me that I am anything more than a young and dark girl who tends to write down too many terrifying thoughts. I have no other substance or rhyme or reason for any other purpose. I can't put the jumble/tangle/mess of ideas in my head into sequence that another can understand. Even those who tend to think the way I do cannot make the pictures as words into any sort of cloud shape. They used to, and we spoke in languages the natural populace struggled to decode. We his behind palms held to our mouths as we laughed at their furrowed brows and puzzled expression. We controlled them and their thought processes. Now it seems that I have faded too far into our lands in between the stars; even the other people think my jabber too complex to translate. It is futile to rip the pen from my hand, either. I will ***** my fingers with the various hairpins around my bedroom/jail cell. cavern and write in my own blood. It must have the color and consistency of ancient violet ink by now (the type Victorian kings and queens wrote in, mind you) considering all the vats I drink to give me inspiration. If that doesn't function the way I wish, then I will carve the screaming in my frontal lobe in relics and hieroglyphics and runes across the furniture and bookcases and walls in an act of rebellion against your repression of my mind. It grows and grows and the forest in my skull cannot/should not/will not cease until someone/anyone/probably you finally toss me into the "done" pile of the people you discovered, understood, and conquered.

She woke suddenly in the dusky black of just-after-midnight from a nightmare that vanished into a puff of dust mores through her ears. Her breath, nonetheless, still came in short bursts as she attempted to regain what oxygen she has lost in the uncountable seconds before her consciousness had become alert. She groped for the source of warmth beside her and was relieved to find him just where she'd left him before falling into the deep sleep she'd just found her way out of. He was a light sleeper and stirred as her fingertips, cool to the touch despite her feverish response to the dream, danced across the slight ridges of his abdominal muscles. He squirmed under her piano-playing on his ribs, turning away in sleepy annoyance. He was used to being awoken like this, but he didn't enjoy it. He put up with it, though; he loved the mysterious creature beneath the thin sheets beside him too much to do anything but. Through even all the years of memories, both good and bad and mediocre, certain things still set him away from the darker path; the curve of her breast out from her ribs then back in a perfect circle toward the muscle beneath her bicep as she lifted her arms to pull a shirt effortlessly over her head, for example, was his favorite. He loved the way each part of her, perhaps apart considered ugly or disgusting, was together a masterpiece of sinew and muscle and skin and hair and blood and bone. She wrapped her arm around his waist then, sending a shiver of pleasure through him, though not strong enough to pull either of them out of their drowsiness. Her other hand, fingernails sliding smoothly across his skin, burrowed between his side and the cool, slightly grimy sheet to entwine with its pair's fingers. She pulled herself to fold over the curve of his back, then sighed and sank deeper into his presence. Her legs, only slightly rough from neglecting to shave the day before, slid between his,, like the supple vines that grow around the thick trunks of trees in the rain forests of South America. She turned her head so he felt the silhouette of her full cheek, her uneven lips (the lower lip seemed in the right light imbalanced and too thin for the upper), her squat nose, her long eyelashes that looked like the entrails of recently abandoned spiderwebs in the morning light (she always complained of them being too thin and ringed her eyes with black, which she always forgot was there and rubbed into a cloud of ash), the edge of her hairline press into his back. One of her toes twitched to catch his in the abyss and tangle of sheets around his feet and they kept it there, two toes entwined as the rest of them. They remained this way for the rest of the night, until the first light leaked and then streamed through the gauzy curtains over the window and he had to rise for work and untangle himself from her hold to kiss her awake and goodbye on the nose before leaving for the day.