Morning light was harsh. A rough hand rubbed her profile with a swinging gesture as her legs swung similiarly over the edge of what was once her campsite. They touched the ground, alas, carpet instead of gravel- a disappointment she might never get over.
What would it be today, she wondered. What would the numbers tell her about how she was to feel? The heart in her "chest" had lost its privilage to decide what her feelings were to be, so the numbers delegated on their own these days. It wasn't that she wanted it, it wasn't that she'd chosen a path of depthless, formless feeling, but her body simply couldn't house the suggestions her brain had made lately. The numbers never lied to her.
With a step and a puff, she thought maybe the weight of the cigarette could sway the outcome, so she stared at its end, burning off of the side of the counter, waiting for it to ash on its own before she could work up the courge to crane her neck down to see. Patentiently, she waited. Brown and yellow tile lingered below her feet and grouped together in a heap that she swore she almost heard expell a collective screech when the black and white star hit.
Her eyes slid down. The numbers never lied to her.
Today it was an honesty with an ease of acceptance, as she knew it would be. Intake had been slim to none, if only due to the fact that it had slipped her mind to nourish. It could be said again that her mind had little control any longer, and she lived inwardly but was directed outwardly, and could not rely on much to tell her what to do when it needed to be done.
Her day was to be grateful to be apart from the days of discontent, in their huddled, blackened mass. The circles below her eyes had rested for a change, but emerged ever darker and all the more complete, as they always did after a night of difference.
A night of sleep, she realized with a small chuckle that caught her off guard. She'd slept while the sun was gone and awoke when it returned to her tiny home. It seemed to her that it had been decades since she'd last done that, and she'd barely been alive for two.
Sticky lives, she'd discovered, were terribly difficult to pry objects from. They were difficult to separate from habits and tendancies. Tendancy was a favorite word of hers, and it lived within her sticky life throughout every day of living it.
Intake abandoned slim to be in cahoots with none. Neither her eyes nor her common sense could tell her which dark, winter month it was or where she was to go at what time and with whom. So safely, she always decided it was away she was expected at, any time whatsoever, and alone. Safely, she always decided it was to be alone.
Oh ****, she's forgotten about the smoldering cigarette on the edge of her bathroom counter. And with a short dash, she lifted it to discover a spot of orangish permanence that would forever remind her of the morning she woke up alongside a number she thought she could co-exist with. She would be wrong, she was always wrong, she always knew she was wrong, so what the **** ever kept her from being right? And who are we kidding, those mornings were numerous and the only differing factor here was that on this morning it slipped her mind to bring her bedside ashtray into the bathroom.
Three digits wrapped themselves around her withered self, the withered thought that once was, "There is no God," and was suddenly, "What is letting me worship as if there is, what is allowing me loyalty like this when I hate all loyalty has ever brought, there is a God involved here but where the **** did she come from and why won't she loosen her fixed grip?"
This was a hazard, she woke up knowing all too well. There was poison in her every step, be they through the kitchen to the front door or from the front door straight to those brown and yellow tiles.
Today her cyanide stroll brought the sharpest points of her face into blistering cold without more than a slight bit of hydration and not even the slighest bit of energy. Exhaustion lifted her up and carried her on its back down a street she walked every day but housed no memories of, to a place where she sat in fervent distraction for hours.
She sunk into the chair she chose and felt pressure on parts of her body she knew shouldn't be accessible. Three digits, she recited like a trained professional, like a mindless scholar simply letting herself be taught as opposed to learning. Three digits, should be two. She was one away, just one, and she knew that by the time she let exhaustion carry her home in the night, the two she deserved would be hers.
How finally, she hoped. How momentous and breathtaking would it be to have my breath taken by a goal I have worked to achieve. How special to commit, (I mean, complete,) two goals at once. All day long, she was experiencing what other people called "day," but she felt it all with eery black fingers around her neck and hips. There, it seemed her bones congregated to show off. And those eery black fingers had had just about enough of the behavior of her bones, of her vision, of the laziness of her throat and overexertion of her dedication and self-control. It was just as well, she thought. The feathery touch of those black fingers felt dead-on. She herself, had had just about enough of self-control becoming totalitarian policies. Miscompliance brought severe, earthy punishment and she was simply too tired for it any longer. Those fingers seized and pushed, and when it was time to go she knew it would be those fingers directing her home tonight instead of her cathartic exhaustion.
In the door, to the tiles, on to judgement, true, true judgement, and there they are. There are the two numbers she wanted all along, validation for her behavior. But even in her relief, death could find no reason to let her survive. There was no note, nothing to explain to him that she loved him, nothing to explain to anyone that she'd loved at all.
She'd been consumed and she was found cold, with an eerily warm smile.
