ten people i knew in the world survived. knew is a strange word, though. the ten, well i knew them in that face in the crowd way, not the knowing with any real consequence sort of thing. the girl who rang up my morning coffee who had her bottom lip pierced, and fought every wednesday with her boyfriend on her mobile; trying to text unnoticed under the counter, but whispering each word as her thumbs slammed the tiny keys. she is among us now. the boyfriend may be here come to think of it, but those kind distinctions have become quite hard to tell. coupling lines blur, and bodies cling without much regard to the propriety of love.
there is that boy i dated once. for a week, i think. he had a summer green tint to his once blonde strands; the tell-tale sign of an orange county boy with too much time on his hands, and chlorine soaked in his hair. we drove to santa monica and sat under the pier while i came down off my latest and greatest escape hatch. he let me scream into his hands, and i let him slip his dick into me. a fair trade, it seemed. i tossed his number into the third bin from the left, behind his apartment, as i walked home with sand itchy on my skin. i wonder if he still tastes of peppermint schapps and marlboro lights, or if he has either he would be willing to share.
the rest are nameless. images peeled off of a blueprint memory, faces from train passes and elevator rides, doctor office receptionists and the gas station attendant who used to sing foreigner's urgent out loud and sold me discounted cigarettes with his number slipped inside. it is hard to tell if they recognize me, or what story they try to attach to my skin, pinned on like a kindergarten reminder. we all forget everything eventually, or at least feign at it, posed and smiling as if all this dark was just the contents of a normal day. anymore now they all back away and turn their eyes from mine, afraid that the things i see above will rub off on them, poison the well, so to speak. they huddle in misconceived safety and try to re-write the world. i am not interested in any of the fabrication.
i used to be the girl in the back of the class chewing her nails, and looping letters into lyrical refrains; i would have traded my grandfather's bicentennial coin collection to live within the confines of a song. clumsy and awkward, gifted my life span's height before i hit puberty, towering over all the skinny blondes who fit right into that everybody wants you mold. my first sexual experience was with a shy boy two years trailing behind me, his braces left tears in the inside of my bottom lip, and he kissed with as much grace as two elephants with tied-together trunks.
most days i was just invisible, fading into the grey walls and missed opportunities. it was hard to grow up with the beautiful people when your body screamed ordinary, and hopefully refundable. now my invisibility is just their desperate grasps at denial. no one cares to admit cowardice, or to look the community martyr straight in the eyes. even the ones who empty and re-fill my veins avert my gaze, leaving gashes in my arms, but nothing more. or the ones no one mentions, who gave me the job in the first place, and the names; how they send their troops when my head is blood loss fuzzy, their masks barely registering in my view, just the sharp sting of what they take from my body as i lay their motionless, more dead than the last time. it was one of them who gave me my afterworld name. i can still hear it slithering out of his razor thin lips, burning the skin as he pressed them too close to my ear. we all have them, all the old ones tossed aside like the regret, like yesterdays.
none of us are who we were before.
***
"is this an actual record player?" my voice in a half-whisper of awed reverence as i stare ahead, wanting to slide my fingers across the grooved surfaces, lift the arm and prick my finger on the needle; become some sort monochromed sleeping beauty. i held back though, half-holding my breath as i always did when we shared space.
i could feel him moving across the room before i caught a glimpse in my peripheral vision, his pallor glowing like chunks of moonbeams turned to flesh. the only colour came from his lips, a sudden splash of rose in sharp contrast to the rest of him. later i would write him as a black and white film strip, cary grant caught in a still frame that someone took a permanent marker to. the burst of red came from a recent feed; it would soon spread across his face into a school girl's blush. life temporarily breathed into him from my bloodletting.
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