Shane called Eliot's name into the still air. The sun was setting in the distance. She spent the day rallying her courage for this conversation. She called again, glanced around, and cut into her arm with a thin knife pilfered from the dining center. The blood dripped to the ground in increasingly finer lines until it stopped entirely. She called again, feeling the blue haze of blood loss, and stabbed. And gouged. And slashed until the floor was slick and her skin the white of China dolls.
"What the hell happened in here? Are you okay?"
Shane embraced him, her hands caressing the stubble of his face and the blood dripping down his shirt, rubies of liquid flowing and falling from the stalactite of her elbow.
"Christ, girl, what did you do in here? Jugulate a pig?" he demanded, stepping back from the scene in horror. He stared in fascination at the areole of crimson surrounding his lover, the gleam of the paring knife in her fist.
"This is my blood; it's okay, I'm fine. I brought you to me. Or maybe me to you. It's simple, I figured it out: you aren't dead, you are just at a different wavelength. When I come far enough into your wavelength -- which yes, does involve all this blood -- I can tune you in and we can be together. Otherwise, you are just scattered like static on a TV."
Eliot rubbed at the blood on his shirt, the pink smear it left on his hand. "I don't think you belong at my wavelength if this is the cost."
She kissed him again, but tensely. "It isn't all about you, El. This means something and I think whatever happened to me happened to you too. You just don't remember, but you are a part of this. If we can figure out why you are like this, we can know why I am too. Someone once told me that there is no coincidence, just the appearance of it. There is a reason we can touch now. We'll find it."
"So this reason isn't snogging?"
She smirk, her irritation turned to vapor. "It isn't always snogging," she grinned but kissed him anyway. He slid his hands over her stomach and back and her scars ceased to be.
<hr>She avoided needles when she could. They were simple, the intimacy of penetration, but only removed her from her body and concerns. Needless needles did nothing to slow the torrent of jagged memory and centipede thought. They paralyze her ability to process, such as it was, and she stopped caring how far past full she was, how she could feel the best parts of her -- what little that was truly her -- leaking out to make room for a stranger's first word or heartbreak. After her first introduction to injected opiates, the next year of her life hurt, her head reeling to catch up until the stimuli overwhelmed and she shot-up again, the cycle repeating more times than she was prepared to count. Once, already crippled by the heroin, she grabbed one of the birds -- she did not know to this day which and did not then care -- and tried to cut the problem off at its source. H didn't touch the bird as it did her. She spent the rest of that night apathetic to the punishment of pecks covering her body. It may have been several nights and days of shaking and sweats, of vomiting and hallucinating, but she only remembered the dark through her withdrawal. She was content thereafter to sell it, but never again use, condemning hypodermics to the most crowded haystack in hell.
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