Hums from machines that clean me out and suck out the tar from my arteries, stealing the awful decay from beneath my eye sockets. It smells of antiseptic, it's sterile, it makes me want to vomit, dirty the white of the walls and the cracks in the ceiling tile with my toxin, with myself. I want to leave myself somewhere, somewhere where they can't scrub me off or leave me to dry out in the sun or force me to make things any different than they always were. Leave me, sticky and sour to the walls, frame me.

I don't like hospitals because they smell like old people, people get sick here and die and the bed sheets I'm on probably have dying grey hairs and last words smeared all over them even though it's been scrubbed and scrubbed so much to make me think it never happened, I feel it, I feel it heating up on my scalp. It peels my skin back, leaving me bare and mangled, emaciated. I'm stuffed with oxygen, pumped full of stuffing, and fed to the lions kept in the basement, another stain on the bed sheets.
There's pretty nurses, they smell like lilacs and fresh clothes. They smell like mothers who sing their children to sleep and mothers who hate how babies grow old and mothers who are sad and mothers who cling to the life in their hands and let the moths eat at their sweaters.            

The pretty nurses come to work and see their baby's face plastered over the faces of the old and the sick, and out of some moral obligation I don't understand, they bathe scarred bodies and suck the mold out of blue flesh and kill the cockroaches that live under fingernails.

There's wires sticking out from my body, and I want to unplug myself, rip them from my knuckles and my chest and my throat and my head, I want them out of my head. As soon as desire rips at my hair, I feel tired, there's black slashing at my eyelids and blood leaking from my mouth and I fall asleep for a long time. I'm dazed, I'm purple and black and spiraled and dizzy.

I still don't like hospitals. And I hate waking up and grasping at empty air feeling for her chest and her brain and her yellowed out teeth.

No one comes to my bedside to visit.

The days pass in and out like sand that sinks at your feet when the water hits them, full of fake sympathy and gross pity that makes me want to squash myself under the heavy machines.

They let me go a few days later, keeping pieces of my brain and vials of my blood with them, they send me off.

When I emerge from those sickly doors, I see a lot of people, more than I have in a long while. It's evening out, I can see curtains closing and lights from behind apartment windows, it's all so alive.

It makes me feel like I had been buried ages ago.

I'm looking for her face.

I don't ever want to see her again but I miss her so tremendously, it's always her and no one else and I loathe it with every gram of skin stretched over my stringy bones and with every blink of heavy eyelids peeling off my eyes. I find the capsules I stowed away in my disgusting collarbones and stumble to an empty alleyway, it smells like trash and looks like raccoons that hiss and shriek at me like I'm the most awful thing they're black bruised eyes have ever seen.

And when I feel like all the life has drained out from my pores, I go back to her, following the carrot on her stick, back to the only place that's left.

Knocking on the door now, I can see lights swirling around my skull , zaps and hums, and when I hear a loud shuffle inside and see an eye on the tiny rusted peephole that isn't hers, the lights get dimmer and then brighter, yelling.

The eye at the door is thin, arched in its angry confusion, and then the door bursts open and naked flesh surrounds my vision, trapping it against the door frame and holding it there, telling me not to look, not to look. A cigarette hanging from his mouth undisturbed and demeaning, his nakedness and his beauty is all circling around my feet and my fists and the blood pouring from his nose.

I hurt with all of my strength, my wicked, weak strength and I'm pounding at his stomach and his face and I'm sobbing, I'm sobbing so pathetically and I'm hitting him so weakly I could laugh but it's all I can do and there's nothing left to do anymore.
With my feeble frame, bones etched out of my skin, stretching, I pin him to the ground and force my fingers into his nose and  I cover his mouth. I crack his ribs and grab his heart that beats so slowly and terribly and I step on it again and again and ask him how it feels and if it feels good to be like this, watching his own beating heart stomped out.

I see her when I take a moment to lift my head. Her bareness isn't lustful or beautiful, it's terrible and agonizing and it makes my voice break, "I hate you too," scratchy and broken and hideous. Looking up from the man who's killed me and left me alive just to watch me bleed over his carpet to see the woman who paid him to do it.
I'm scratching at his chest leaving bloody marks etched across his skin and I would kill him if I didn't hear the sirens coming closer and if I didn't hear her cry over the phone, choking on her own sour mucus.
I don't like hearing her cry, no matter how much I don't mind seeing her bleed and vomit and scream.

I would punch her too, but I get so sleepy my eyes feel like rocks and the place underneath my eyelids is spinning around, so I end up burying my face in the crook of her neck and sobbing, cursing her name under my breath and hating her ever so gently, so gently not even a dog could smell my loathing under its polished nose.