Your dad's house isn't your dad's house anymore but we don't like letting go so we visit it anyways even though it makes you bite the skin off your thumb.

From the car windows, we watch the wooden deck turn to concrete, the trees in the backyard keel over from the chainsaws, the windows black from the new catalogs.
It's a lot different now, so different I nearly miss it when I'm driving down the street, I have to brake really fast and she gets scared when I do that so I try my best not to even though I think she brakes too slow and maybe it's worse than braking too fast.

We hate it, hate every part of it but we always come back to watch the trees burn and the curtains change and the wallpaper peel. We watch it change into a grey pit with the mice buried really far in the dirt, but you can still hear them squeak if you press your ears up against the ground. (It's our dirty little secret, don't tell the homeowners about the ant infestation or the alcoholism in the insulation.)

It's not like the memories she made here were something she liked to think about, so I'm not quite sure why she comes here at all, handing me the keys. She stares out the window with a look in her eye, acceptance or anger or hate or maybe everything all at once and I can see her scratching her thighs, leaving these little marks I'd trace with my finger and lick the sweat off of.

She never says anything on days like this.

Does she see it, hear it? The bugs? Does it make her sick and crazy and violent and does it make her want to crawl somewhere small and eat her belly button? Does she regret where she is and how she got here and does she wish her skin wasn't my skin and that her bones weren't bones so she could sink flat on the floor and deflate? Does she want to dig her car keys into my throat and throw me in the exhaust pipe, the trunk, her knees, her eye sockets, her brain? She craves my bleeding so desperately.
Melting me down over the stove, drinking.

She's twisting the umbilical cord, hoping it falters and crumbles. (We have a pretty urn to store it in.)

When she starts to play with the radio and the heating and the air conditioning and the lights and the fans, (buttons, buttons, buttons,) I know she's craving poison and without saying a word, I start to drive. When we get home she'll get drunk and take too many pills from the bathroom cabinet, and maybe I will too if I feel like turning myself inside out and ironing myself out and hanging myself in the closet.

There's a wall in the back of the kitchen cabinet I let myself draw on with pretty pens and markers I find at the corner store. Sometimes I go out searching for new colors I haven't found yet, ones I like, browns and greens and blues and purples in different shades and vibrance that light up your skin like stars on sick cheeks.
It's all just shapes and numbers and letters and if she found my little spot in my little closet she'd either laugh at me or get mad because now we'll never be able to sell this ugly place or maybe she'd just start drawing too.
I'm making a tree out of numbers, tiny zeros and ones and threes and nines and I'm adding little birds on the power line above it. Squares and circles and stars and her and her and her and her and cheap wine and the cabinet and sleeping too much and sleep and sleep and sleep and skin.

The sheets ripped that night, a small tear growing bigger, bigger still. A heat, an insatiable fervor boiling in her guts and stabbing the air. She topples me over with her awkward frame, boney and pointy and hard, clawing at my face, biting into my skin, yelling and yelling and I'm flipping her over and pinning her down and trying not to bite back and our legs are touching and our veins are twisting together and our blood is in and out of each other's brains. Her elbow plunged into my side and her fist beating down onto my stomach until she does it for so long that she gets tired and knows it won't do anything and it won't change anything, it's useless, resisting like that.
We fall asleep, braided together on the head of a beggar, the bones of the cross beams and the eyes of the dogs.

It's late that night when I decide to leave her, I don't pack anything except for my cigarettes and my markers and the blanket I've had since I was small.

Before I leave, I watch the rise and fall of her chest, she's neutral in sleep. She doesn't desperately beg at my feet or try and slip a knife in my chest, and her face is calm until it isn't, until it shifts and contorts in these weird ways and the feathers slip from her ears and so does the acid.

I leave like I was never there. Bandaged collarbones and bleeding cheeks, I'm off on the bus to someplace that doesn't feel like her and doesn't smell like her and I'm off to replace all the blood in my body so she can get out of my veins.

My knees have gotten more prominent, my wrists thinner, the veins in my neck protruding out from my flesh like sinners and criminals and all the holy people of the world. My mouth is dry and there's visions of her swinging her legs and thinking of making things different and if I tried to make things different I'd be honoring her ugly will and her ugly ideas and all the ugly things we do to keep ourselves above the clouds. And so, determined to keep things the exact same so as to not rouse her from her sleep or shake more feathers from her ears, I make sure to never, ever change.

I dig into my pockets, hoping not to find them, pharmacy plastic and arrows I can't really line up, a little shake.
I'm on a roof somewhere in the city, I'm high up but I'm not getting any vertigo, my legs dangling over the edge. I'm about to think about her, a young memory, but I push it out and it's really heavy and I have a lot of trouble carrying it so I have to catch my breath after it leaves, pushed from my peripherals and out of my nostrils.

A little pop, plastic, shaking, prescribed poison, I love it more than life itself and it whisks me away, I think it's delicious, don't you? Licking my lips and curving my nails inwards, devouring. Swallowing. Dissolving in my stomach, reeling, bouncing, spreading to my mind and letting it go. Laughing and crying and yelling and ripping my back open. Playing, playing, it's all play.
It's all play until you fall asleep when the opium reaches your teeth and the foam is bubbling off your lips.

I don't like the dream I have, the black that mauls at my eyelids, the morphine pulsing in my body, beating, beating.

It's a warm day, but the wind cuts through my muscles like sharp knives. Especially from up here, it's colder here, sharpened blades.

She likes rooftops, always dragging me around the city way too late at night with those plastic bags you get for fifty cents at the grocery stores, stolen alcohol inside to chase a feeling, try to trap it in a jar and sell it.

Learning to pick locks, sneaking around just for the thrill of dizziness and being where we aren't supposed to be, spinning around in an uneven circle. Higher, higher all the time.

She'll set down a little picnic blanket when we find the right spot, a pink gingham blanket, it's thin and waves away in the wind but she likes tracing the squares with the tips of her fingers and it makes me think about what her fingers would feel like on my skin. My forehead, my thighs, waist, would she put her hands there? If I had fallen and blood was seeping through my shirt, would she lift it, care so much, be worried, her breath on my skin, her hands brushing my ribs, would she bandage it? I think of her licking my wounds, blood on her tongue.

We stand too close to the edge of the roof, our legs dangling, the blanket whipping and cracking. We get closer and closer to the edge, being together, dying. Maybe we'll jump off together, nothing but pavement, red pavement.

When I feel the hands on my back, behind me, pushing, pushing, against bathroom walls, against the skies and the clouds and the long fall down, I don't ask her why.

She's pushing me off the edge with a wild, free smile, killing me, she's killing me.

I wake in a sterile room, and maybe I shouldn't have woken at all.