Her knees are tucked to her chest, swinging her legs from over the mattress, like an impatient child told to be still. She smiles up at me, only for a second, eyes flickering to bandages and wounds messily, lazily wrapped.
The air is drugs, a line to snort. My fingers curling into themselves and leaving little imprints behind, traces of the sick. I hear crickets and sirens, somewhere out the window, far away, the curtain flails about in the wind.

"I-I, I sorta was wondering if you could, take me out tonight," she says everything like it isn't a big deal, but I can tell she's nervous, she fiddles with her hair, twisting it around the tips of her fingers like some beautiful staircase you never can get to the top of.
She's tragically beautiful, seeing her, you can tell something's wrong; has been for a long time, but something about her, makes you want to go mad and makes you want to be just like her, broken and loud and a torn apart sob.

Leaning in, "What do we need to go out for?"

"Well I've been thinking, maybe we should try, t-try a little harder, maybe we could, we could be different."

The staircase goes higher and higher and my eyes swirl. Her finger, her hand, hair, I'm climbing somewhere.

"We're bums."

Something burns. Acid pouring into my ears and going at my brain, taking my vision first.

"Are you seriously talking about change right now? You must be out of your goddamn mind. There is no changing you, all you live for is another hit and that other guy downto-"

"Don't you fucking dare." She's quiet, her tone steady, filled with poison. I feel her entering my bloodstream. Every syllable screams hate and her eyes scream jealousy and disgust and exhaustion and desire and I'm searching for anger and I can find it buried somewhere far.

And with that, we peel away from each other again. She packs her stuff and her drugs and her cigarettes and she's off to sleep on a stranger's couch until she wakes up on the street and has to come back again. I'll wait for the knock on the door, her apology, the same every time. The "I love you's" that don't mean a thing and the "sorry's" that don't mean much more.

We don't love, we aren't like that, we hate and then we strike so passionately we stumble back into each other, drenched in each other's sweat and twisted desires.

I dream of gold that night.

We are young again. She's crying because her dad is drunk. Even though her face is blurry, her hair is clean and she smells like the cheap soap you buy when you're down on your luck. Gold knuckles and blue, beating hearts, beating together, never drifting. So close we feel we might fall, tumble into each other and the acne on our cheeks.

There's liquor bottles littered on the floor; rum we stole and mixed with coke because she doesn't like the taste of alcohol because it reminds her of her dad.

When her fingertips brush my skin, she paints me her shade of gold, I am shining, burning like the sun. I am her canvas of teenage horniness and acne, her canvas of lust and libido.  Dig into my body and rub my intestines against your skin, make them gold.

She is gold and I am burning, a deep crimson red.

A guitar, four chords. My life on her cheeks. I'm okay with being awful. Drunk, the carpet itchy against my face, our hair laying, quiet, fragile. She tells me she likes it when I sing, I'm not good at all.

Embarrassment we never like to talk about because we don't like to remember how young we truly are, we want to scratch into each others bodies and I want to climb into her womb and hide, hide in her cage of red.

Accidental touch that isn't accidental. Everything is meaningful and meaningless all at once because we're drunk and young and stupid and we couldn't possibly know what love is because to us it just looks like tired eyes and screaming and going out for a smoke.

She reached a hand to my face, her eyes kind, tucking my hair behind my ear. I live in the white of her teeth and her ugliness. "I think I'm in love with you," she's giggling, "Why?" I'm giggling too. We're so pathetic like this.
A mouth catches a jaw, fingertips a collarbone. Purposeful and meaningless and drunken.

It's different being in love when you're beautiful and every curve of your body is loved and your parents have money and things are beautiful and your body is smooth and your knees aren't scratched up and your nails don't drag into your skin. But this, this is different. Whispers.
Greasy, sweaty, clinging onto each other, finding each other, needing each other more than anything ever and holding on and never letting go. They don't like love stories when they cry and hurt and bleed and smoke cigarettes until their lungs are black and drink alcohol until they vomit and never eat because they aren't hungry and want to be skinnier and so they starve starve starve of everything there is until there's nothing else.

"I don't know."

I wake feeling nothing much at all, a wake without blood on the sheets and maybe for a moment something flashes through me and I turn to see her. She isn't there. I laugh, laugh in this sick, sad way and it's so full of bitterness it isn't really a laugh at all.

A wicked part of me craves begging at my door, her knees scraped, wake the neighbors, yell, pity, apologize, apologize, apologize, love me, love me, love me until there's no love left to give and you leave again.

Let's do it all, again and again my darling. Let's love and hate and mix together and melt onto the floor.

Take my love and give it all back, all at once, I crave the thrill, the rush, I crave you, however much I hate you.