She's laying on her back. On the pavement, splayed across the cracks, her hair looks clean, dry.  Underneath her shawls and her scarves and blankets, she's there, but barely.
Under the blinks of the stars and the stare of the moon, her existence gets smaller, and maybe mine does too, but I don't think about it too much.

She's hurt, scraped knees, chapped lips.

"Come see the stars," instead of begging and love confessions and apologies and sex that neither of us want but need because we need to atone somehow, her voice is steady, commanding, but so tired, snap and break. Fragile.

The rubber band gets tighter, the fibres weaker, quiet snapping. Snap, snap, snap, (touch me.) She's shirtless, her breast barely visible from the blanket wrapped around her small body. I think of children.
I think of her womb, wonder if we could visit again, destroy it more, kill my thoughts, kill hers, watch her belly get bigger until it explodes onto itself, a mess of red and tears and bad plumbing.

I'm laying my head on her chest, looking at the stars.

"I'm not sorry," she says it in the middle of a breath, like she had been thinking of it a long time before she said it.
Her voice is blank, an unused canvas of a dead artist, selling for millions in all of its emptiness,  (is this her time to slip the knife in?)

"Okay."

I had to carry her to the bathroom, strung over my arms, draped like old curtains over old mirrors hiding old things and old people.

And just as I have many times before, I scrubbed her body and rinsed her off, watching the blood slip away in small spirited streams. Rubbing alcohol and bandages, flesh wounds. Pressing a cotton ball to her neck, pressing harder, a wince.

Her thin fingers grab my wrist, she's sliding off the counter, pushing, pushing, my back hitting the wall, she's grabbing my other wrist. Only letting go to trace my collarbones, pressing. I'm pressing the rubbing alcohol to her neck, harder, harder.

Her eyes, velvety brown, a leather couch, a baby's cry. Her eyes and her voice wrapping around my wrists in a carnal tango, it's erotic and lustful and inherent and gross. She's leering over me, drilling into my skull and tucking me into bed and locking her fingers into mine.

She speaks so quietly, it's almost a whisper, her breath speaking into my neck, "I hate you. I hate coming back here. I wish things were different."

"Yeah."

She retreats back to her spot on the counter, little red marks left on my wrist from her grasp, her eyes sad, but she won't cry, not now. Not when things are like this, not when the steam from the hot water in the bathtub makes the air so heavy we can't breath and not when we both know there's nothing we can do that'll take it back or make it any better at all and not when we're both wishing we were somewhere far away in a time long ago in a park with dying flowers and covered eyes.

I think of laughter, I'd laugh right now if I could throw the bitterness from my throat onto the tile, laugh, throw antiseptic on her scrapes, wince, lick each other's wounds, take our organs out and put them in steel cabinets, sell them to the government.

Even now that the words that were tucked away behind eyes and glares and rage have been said, hung out like laundry, nothing changes.

Let go, let go. We can't, we won't allow it, (is that love? It must be.) Then keep me far, but cry on my doorstep and lay your eggs in the ceiling, run to me and run from me and leave and scream when I'm there and when I'm not. Count my fingers and count my toes, make sure they're there, touch my bones, kiss me.

We fall asleep in each other's skin, intertwined, weaved. A leg hooked on to another, arms grasping at a breast, a cheek. We taunt each other's dreams, clawing and screeching into the back of our skulls, howling. At some point, I walk far enough to find some dream that maybe isn't so bad, (the screeching is quieter here, muffled.)

She's twirling the car keys around her index finger. The engine is rumbling and it's puffing out smoke from its long exhaust pipes, coughing. It's a beetle, painted hazel, with little stuffed animals and solar powered dancing hula girls littered on the inside like it didn't matter at all, like everything was exactly where it was meant to be. It smells like her inside, peppermint and rose and lavender. A twinge of alcohol, cologne, sex.

She's wearing a sweater that's too big for her, riding past her wrists and the tips of her fingers. The fabric covering her ribs, I can't hold her flesh, can't beg her to stay. With a touch she might fade far, she might run, she might crumble like stone, dust. Addicted, corrupted, I'm trapped in her sweaters and cars and peppermint perfumes, and right here in this fuzzy memory, I really love it a whole lot.

I'm driving. She's scared of bombs under driver's seats and pressing the wrong pedal and getting honked at. Instead, she likes to look out the window,
she laughs at the songs on the radio and clouds that look like rabbits, talking to herself, mostly. She does that a lot, running on these tangents, bouncing around from one topic to another, (trees, God, daycares, leaky noses, favorite foods.) She made it sound so meaningful, like it was something the whole world had to hear, (did you know ladybugs aren't all ladies?) I listened, because every word that carelessly but so carefully spilled from her tongue made me want to kiss her until I couldn't breathe and live inside her ribs, listen to her vocal cords vibrate from her bones as she talked about birds and pillowcases and all the things she knows about that she loves so much because they're important to her for no specific reason at all.
She didn't speak because she was scared of silence, she spoke because things mattered.

"You're cute," she'll say it in between laughs, bursts of giggles pouring out from her teeth. To me now, her body is foreign, her collarbones and the curves of her thighs something to stare at, blush at, lust after, a secret kept away, (she thinks I'm cute.) I think about the compliment for a long while, in all its awkward innocence.

"It's almost like you never know what to say, it's almost like you're scared," she's grinning widely, so wide it stretches up into the sky and rides on a cloud, watching.
"What are you scared of, anyways?" She's more serious now, her eyes kind, curious.

When I wake, I feel weird, exposed and naked, even though I'm still twisted with her in bed, it's different, everything is different. She doesn't giggle through her teeth with her every hair screaming it's freedom, now she waits and thinks before she does things and smokes too much and cries too much and is sad all the time and is tired and spends too much money on drugs and leaves and comes back even sadder than before and I wish things would've been different too.