If I start smoking now maybe I could get to heaven faster. Too late, Violet mouths, blood running from her wrists.

Mom called early that morning and our conversation sounded like a death rattle: I breathe because I can't speak - pale, quick, staccato gulps. I left my voice somewhere. An open drawer, or empty closet. My cluttered lungs, perhaps. So much love and so much pain and no place to put it. I want. I love. I want....Mom? I think I understand her now, when she says that things never really change, that people are all basically the same and that her heart simply isn't big enough for the whole world any longer and that I - I can't go home, and why am I running cross-country, aborting every iota of what I was? But its what I need. Want? Love? Things like that - You see, I needed to leave - I explain in the same explosive breaths which held my tongue, knocked down every wall I'd been building for some time - Submerge in the very air you stroked against my thighs in the dark. Jared - I need you and I can't need anyone. Not now, not anytime soon, stop this waking in your eyelids when I still haven't found mine. Still like that time in the drugstore and I called you because my hands felt numb - Snow-kissed cellular decomposition and breathing heavily in bathroom stalls now has a different meaning as I am tracing my fingers along your back, as if trying to read Braille. And maybe it's time to come up for some air.

The kisses were so lush they became as inconsequential as sunlight.

The things we take for granted.

I'm talking about last year then last Monday and how I said I'd never been in love and how maybe that is a lie. Completely unintentional, I assure you. Picture that summer evening, on your porch, counting minutes - memories, you spoke loudly in strained whispers, baby sleeping in next room, listed my numerous offenses and then told me quickly, succinctly exactly how and where I was going to die alone at 334 Poverty Road.I watched the sunlight fade from yellow to red the sky bloody, diseased. The wound won, Violet tells me staring at the floor, biting a nail lazily, three times over. Stop pretending you never tried - Try? I wake at 3 a.m. still running knuckles over eyelids counting down the seconds to my rebirth. Simon, with a single eye twitch tells me that identity is illusion, and maybe that's why Violet needs to cut herself in bathroom stalls, needing, knowing it's the same person, bag of sultry flesh and it's really her that bleeds. I say, why bathroom stalls, and he murmurs, this is inconsequential, kisses my forehead: beautiful, could you lend me $5.50 for the trip back home?