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Description
"I need for you to save me."

Her unexpected words fall like chunks of ice between us. Heavy and jagged. Crimson hail that clogs my veins and makes that dreadful organ in my chest spasm painfully. I need to laugh, so that she will follow my lead. So that we can forget about invisible scars and demons and bloody keys and then we can go back to boys and tan lines and how makeup makes us feel like liars. But surely the silent storm that she has dragged up to the surface has filled my lungs with dirty pink slush and piled up imaginary snow banks that bury my windpipe. The sudden chill makes the soft hairs along the back of my neck stand at attention and raises goosepimples along my shoulders as I choke on the silence.

"Save you from what?" I ask in her same tone, the hesitant softness of my voice contrasts with the weight of my words.

I wait.
I wait for the purse of glossed lips together into a tight line until they become one and then disappear in her nervous tick as she gently sucks them back into her mouth. I wait for the serious crease between her eyes that will make me think

She's too young.

I don't recieve either of those anticipated reactions. Jonesy, I can't see the line. The thought comes anyways. Though it remains just that - as her shirt pools somewhere on the floor- a thought.
Intangible. Extraneous. Irrelevent.

We're all too young.

I have a blog somewhere called 'the absence of tragedy'. I stole the title from another girl that I admired. A girl with a tounge of stainless steel who wrote beauty, but only when she was sad. Everyone loved her wise-beyond-her-years- words and heartclenchingly honest stanzas, but was it worth it?
It's not fair.

I am no writer.

I'm not even an artist.

And yet at the revelation of the expanse of the sun-soaked skin of her bare back I can see the intricate still-wet ink workings like a projection on a blank canvas. The hypothetical story of her life, the only version I know, glints dangerously but briefly in the light filtering through the blinds as a car passes in the night. I trace ethereal caligraphy with my fingertips as it loops around the blade of her shoulder, climbs, and then dips between acute collarbones. I shape false promises and try to stitch the broken pieces with quivering lips.

"What are you doing?" The question is obviously unnecessary but she asks it anyways, without flinching, even when her voice cracks, for both of our sakes.The mouth that delicately forms her words I now know is sticky and sweet like blackberries but underneath, brutally chapped.

"Saving you?"

Her cheeks are bright but her eyes are impossibly dark in the wilting light. Her breath is shallow, quick, and I decide that this is a good sign. Mostly because I do not want to think about what will happen if it is not. She gives no affirmation that I am attuned to, but I take the absence of a signal as the equivalent of one. She does not protest.

I cannot shake the gnawing feeling that this is all wrong, somehow, and at first it keeps me stiff, muscles tensed as if to run at the drop of a hat. However, I am still choking on silence and now darkness like smoke and ash that melts the ice in my lungs and so much heat, heat.

I hate to be touched. The feeling of being handled that makes my stomach churn.
She knows this.
I taste salt and the thorns that prick at my skin as I peruse the tall grasses on the hunt for tiny, ripe blackberries and so much HER that I should find it distasteful, but I don't stop. I don't even know if I can.

Later, in the gloom, I am sure that my fingertips are stained black and my body smeared with grievous blotches that are surely from some sort of abuse.

Something dark oozes from my lips and my tastebuds sway to the sorrowful tune of bitter ink.

Description
"I need for you to save me."

Her unexpected words fall like chunks of ice between us. Heavy and jagged. Crimson hail that clogs my veins and makes that dreadful organ in my chest spasm painfully. I need to laugh, so that she will follow my lead. So that we can forget about invisible scars and demons and bloody keys and then we can go back to boys and tan lines and how makeup makes us feel like liars. But surely the silent storm that she has dragged up to the surface has filled my lungs with dirty pink slush and piled up imaginary snow banks that bury my windpipe. The sudden chill makes the soft hairs along the back of my neck stand at attention and raises goosepimples along my shoulders as I choke on the silence.

"Save you from what?" I ask in her same tone, the hesitant softness of my voice contrasts with the weight of my words.

I wait.
I wait for the purse of glossed lips together into a tight line until they become one and then disappear in her nervous tick as she gently sucks them back into her mouth. I wait for the serious crease between her eyes that will make me think

She's too young.

I don't recieve either of those anticipated reactions. Jonesy, I can't see the line. The thought comes anyways. Though it remains just that - as her shirt pools somewhere on the floor- a thought.
Intangible. Extraneous. Irrelevent.

We're all too young.

I have a blog somewhere called 'the absence of tragedy'. I stole the title from another girl that I admired. A girl with a tounge of stainless steel who wrote beauty, but only when she was sad. Everyone loved her wise-beyond-her-years- words and heartclenchingly honest stanzas, but was it worth it?
It's not fair.

I am no writer.

I'm not even an artist.

And yet at the revelation of the expanse of the sun-soaked skin of her bare back I can see the intricate still-wet ink workings like a projection on a blank canvas. The hypothetical story of her life, the only version I know, glints dangerously but briefly in the light filtering through the blinds as a car passes in the night. I trace ethereal caligraphy with my fingertips as it loops around the blade of her shoulder, climbs, and then dips between acute collarbones. I shape false promises and try to stitch the broken pieces with quivering lips.

"What are you doing?" The question is obviously unnecessary but she asks it anyways, without flinching, even when her voice cracks, for both of our sakes.The mouth that delicately forms her words I now know is sticky and sweet like blackberries but underneath, brutally chapped.

"Saving you?"

Her cheeks are bright but her eyes are impossibly dark in the wilting light. Her breath is shallow, quick, and I decide that this is a good sign. Mostly because I do not want to think about what will happen if it is not. She gives no affirmation that I am attuned to, but I take the absence of a signal as the equivalent of one. She does not protest.

I cannot shake the gnawing feeling that this is all wrong, somehow, and at first it keeps me stiff, muscles tensed as if to run at the drop of a hat. However, I am still choking on silence and now darkness like smoke and ash that melts the ice in my lungs and so much heat, heat.

I hate to be touched. The feeling of being handled that makes my stomach churn.
She knows this.
I taste salt and the thorns that prick at my skin as I peruse the tall grasses on the hunt for tiny, ripe blackberries and so much HER that I should find it distasteful, but I don't stop. I don't even know if I can.

Later, in the gloom, I am sure that my fingertips are stained black and my body smeared with grievous blotches that are surely from some sort of abuse.

Something dark oozes from my lips and my tastebuds sway to the sorrowful tune of bitter ink.