Laura

The bathroom floor bleeds tenderly in the cold and two girls talk in the backdrop of love.

It was a long night. We poured coffee, and I stood in the door, starkly.

"I love you still"

I love you still. Though the mountains decay and fall against time, though you cannot climb every single one. As the sand drifts into the sea, as birds slow their flight and drop, as the salt mixes in; we are left with ourselves, naked. Brushing against time and all it means.

Against the tapestry of hatred, I see that there is not much to do, and nothing left still. So out of my ribs I procure something tender, least we destroy ourselves, least we are left immobile against our own clawing ravaging. I would like to give you something against it all. This is the highest goodness (or something close to it), though I don't know what that means and can only try to. And it's all I can give you. You know I am quite powerless. Therein, lies my power. Call it a slave philosophy, there is no other one.

I am out of my stupor. She shifts.

"Do you, really?"

"You know I do."

A silence.

"Why do you do what you do?"

"There is no other way."

"I think that's quite bollocks, really. You think you're backed up against a brick wall, but you're leaning against a window."

A shuddered breath, and then the exhale of a sigh. She continues.

"And you take your time to light a cigarette. Don't give me that nonsense about tuning up and playing a violin while the titanic sinks. There's a boat. This isn't the last shred of beauty you have to draw out, and if it is, you shouldn't. It's senseless, dangerous, polluting the air, and for what? There isn't anything romantic about tobacco. You're bleeding already. Why don't you just break it in?"

She pauses, a tear in her eye.

"You're killing the ones around you. The ship isn't sinking."

The water is cold and purifying.

"I.. I can't take any more."

"That's bollocks, and you know it."

I turn my head, stifle a tear to see her like this, splayed on the bathroom floor, eyes half-dead and legs folded to fit the shower. Like a kid. Like she's counting clouds at a picnic, making out happy pictures. I readjust myself, take two steps forward, and set out to steel myself on my resolve. Te see it to it's end and have her on my journey, and me, in hers. I respond. Quiet, hurt, in pain, and doubly sincere.

"This is about you. You're sinking."

I sit on the cold tile by her and feel a shiver running across my knuckles. I don't know how she enjoys this. Or if, she has to. It's snowing out, the window is open, and it's so clean outside that I can feel the dirt. It's the same way some psychopaths are overly neat and tidy and it sets people off. The world is clinical, I romanticize shitty leaves but I think it's because to me... it has to be. There has to be something beautiful about this. I claw that pain can't be senseless, that dirt makes it genuine. But I think it's just as cheap if it's manufactured. I stalled on my pain, I catch up in the present, I pay in the future. All I can afford is projectors and stale popcorn, playing a movie that I should be bored of by now, but God,

I have to revel in the feeling.

I hear a whisper. I don't know whose. A begging angel, maybe. "You can't."

I hear my own. "I don't want to."

"You can't."

Foolishly, foolishly. I think that the world is too ready to throw out pain like last night's shitty pasta and diagnose it as something wrong with you. Maybe there's something wrong with this.

I come back to the present. She looks at me, grief-stricken.

"Hm?" Gently. I do it gently.

She's sinking.

"I don't want to be. I didn't want this to happen."

"It was about time." And I look at her so sadly.

I lean in to give her cold body a hug, a kiss would be inappropriate. I don't know what she's thinking, I think she's feeling something instead.

"I just wish she wasn't dead."

"Yeah?"

"I hate this, Laura."

"I know you do."

And the bathroom bursts into flames.