Glue.

She begs sleep to fell her,to beat her like a rented mule.She pleads for sleep to kick her ass,to knock her out.

She rolls the dice as she goes under. Luck be a lady tonight. No one understands so she doesn’t talk.(She doesn’t understand and hardly even talks to herself )  Mute. She has no language.No map to take her home.

They just think that she’s crazy. That’s ok,its a free country,they can think whatever the hell they want. As time takes its toll she tends to wonder and worry less about what anyone may think at all.Loss has granted an amnesty from concern.

Crazy. Uh-huh. Sure.

He didn’t though. He didn’t think she was crazy at all. He knew she was a fuck-up of the first degree and finest pedigree. Just like him. That she had hustled and fought her whole long liars life just like him. Both thrown away and over-looked they clung to each other like children .Almost afraid. Editing their lives so the other would not turn in disgust. But the other never did. Telling their terrible tales in tiny installments,receiving applause and smiles form the other rather than grimaces of disgust. It was heaven. They were stuck like glue.

They still are.

Bless their fucked up damaged selves.She could not believe that she was enough and he could not believe that she was for real. They were so hurt by life that they did not know what to do with the real thing.

It was fragile.It was spun out of sugar and soundchecks.Woven from stains,boarding passes,Mr Pibbs, sweat and utter longing. It was written on their palms,twin lifelines and passed in notes.Recklessly inked onto their flesh .It was their birthright.

And still she dreams of him,without fail, every night.

She remembers every hotel room,the static of the sheets,the mean thin towels,the number-mounted doors . Their whole world was them.That was all that mattered. They were selfish with it. Before she would fall asleep she would have a flash of recognition.The same one that struck her on the day that they met. The absolute familiarity of knowing that you have met yourself. The same animal. Taking a huge greedy breath of their scent  intertwined on the still air she would smile and drift under curled around him.

Only the rejected and scared understand.The abandoned. She had stored nothing but love beneath her hard hide,waiting for him,her other half, her answer.What you have to wrap your head around here ,what you have to try to understand, you see ,was  if she  could save him, if he wanted to be saved?….Well,she would in turn save herself.

And it would be there, safe together and free off the things that had haunted and hunted them their whole disastrous lives,that they could start over and win.

The dream takes her back,high above Eagle Rock in the grounds of the Pink Palace.She stood next to him, her friend.He smiled and pressed his face to the side of her hip.Her heart hitched and flew on wings of fire and gold from her open mouth. He pulled back shyly and they both smiled.

Love. A lifetime spent waiting for her love..

He treated her like all the rest in the end.He didn’t want to trust that she loved him.That she was different so he drove her mad and drove her away just so he would be right in his self loathing. That women are all the same. Boy, was he ever wrong.

And now she dreams. She dreams that she was really the answer for him.That they were forever.

She piles up pillows on the empty side of her bed and sleeps fitfully with her arms wrapped around her tattooed shell.She remembers his huge hands ,so territorial,claiming her in the dark.She would smile her lions smile in the sticky Hollywood night and try to climb inside him.So hot for him she swore her tattoos smudged beneath her skin.Two alpha’s tangled in a knot on the San Andreas fault-line.

They would languidly bathe together .Always making a mess. Living on creamy caramel laced drinks and frozen Popsicles.They spoke in shorthand littered with private references and pet names. His voice low and filthy, telling her of  the forth coming obscenities yet to be danced upon her dermis would make her pupils dilate and her knees weak with longing and desire.

There was a time when they couldn’t be in the same space without touching. Standing in line at the market,in the car.Always connected.Hands on hips, curling round the tender nape of a neck, fingers laced.When he was proud that she was his woman. He desired her all the time as she did him. They glowed with rude health and a compliant illicit sincerity. Blunt force desire. If they hadn’t just fucked you could bet your bottom dollar that they were going to sooner rather than later.

This was before he decided that she had betrayed him somehow,before his paranoia stole her hero from her.She spun in confusion ,defending herself against crimes she had never committed.Against actions that she never would have even considered under threat of death.

She longed for him when they were apart and wrote their names, painstakingly epic upon backstage walls all over California.Knowing that he would see them soon enough on his tours and that they would make him smile. All she wanted,all see needed ,all she was devoted to was him.

She is not real now. Breathing but no longer alive.

She listens to her Dr’s, well,sometimes. They look exhausted by her destruction.

She stays alone and untouched. Married to the past.   Her few friends are done with her now. Knowing that he has moved on they inform her that he is now “in a relationship” on some status update .Her scattered soul dies a little more. They tell her because they want to hurt her out of it,to push her back to life.

But all she can remember is the man that she saw beneath the battered bullshit and hopeless excuses.The potential for good if he could forgive himself. One lost night,long ago,she knelt between his knees  in their tiny apartment as he sat deep in his black leather chair.She pressed her kiss swollen mouth to his sternum and sang directly into his heart.The words that he had written for his best friend.

She had finally arrived in the middle of nowhere and into the arms she had waited two thousand nine hundred and twenty days for.

She felt that they had somehow solved something just by knowing each other.

He pushed her and she bent into shapes for him that took his jaded breath away.

He held the softest part of her Hello Kitty heart like it was worth a million in prizes,a living thing,how she swooned.

Her eyes glaze like cataracts now and she tells no one anything. She’s dead now. She tries but she is dead.

On the rare days that she has the energy she is mean with it.Pacing like a big animal,wearing a groove in time, in the floor….Tries to picture where he lives,whose bed his boots are under now. Does her love her? Does he tell her he does? Did this new cunt slip into the space that she left? She never wanted to go but he didn’t like her in the end. Her best friend.The love of her life.And it was there that hope died.

Is she blonde? Brunette? What does it even matter. What does anything matter?

(“If you go now,I will never speak to you again” he ranted. She threw her case into the cab and sobbed all the way across the ocean.)

She lost.She is lost. This is real.This is permanent.She remembers everything and it robs her of sleep .Its the memories that keep her awake.

The Dr says “25mg Phenergan.”

The Dr says “Mersyndol 450mg.”

Its like a list of characters.The five dollar words.Codeine,promethazine hydrochloride,doxylamine sulphate,Valium,Prozac,Zoloft,xanax. Blunt edged benzos that they want her to take when she sits before them twisting, silent tears running asking the question that cannot be answered.Pills that she denies.Nothing they can do to solve her so they aim to drug her instead.

They say that its ok and that it wont be forever.She doesn’t believe a fucking word of it.

“Why,why,why,why,why,why why??”  she croaks like some graved voiced bird call.Some prayer.A song.A chant.

All the time going mad with the thought of him touching someone the way that he touched her at their sacred start. Under her head at night,bunched in her bitten fist ,his shirt,his scent growing fainter…..

“One day” she thinks with a shadow of a smile “I won’t wake up and he will be there waiting for me and it will be ok”

And it is there that  they will never let each other go.