We sat on a grassy island, wrapped by a cold stream.

Keith stretched his legs until his heels almost skimmed the water. “Yeah, a little.”

I drew my legs up to my chest, wrapping my arms around my knees. “I keep taking it out on every one else, and when I’m not, I’m at my own throat.”

He smiled that lazy smile, rolling over onto his back and propping his head up with the palm of his hand. “You know there’s only one person who can judge you. You don’t keep having to weigh your own sins and kindness against one another.”

I rested my face against my forearms, nose tucked into the space of my left elbow. “I haven’t heard Him in a long time. All he does is reach down to earth and pull me away from disaster. Then He’s gone. I’m still without any answer to where I’m supposed to go.”

Keith reached out and wrapped his hand around my golden brown braid. He stroked it down until it ended at the small of my back. “You’re standing in front of yourself.”

The affection only pushed me towards a quiet weeping, tear drops dusting the fine blonde hairs on my arms. “I can’t see beyond myself.”

“Bingo, kiddo. You know you can. Maybe one day you won’t need me anymore. Maybe you won’t need any of us anymore.”

I looked at him, horrified. “I can’t live without you. I can’t live without any of you. When everything goes wrong, you all fix it. You make the hurt go away. You make the loneliness bearable.”

Keigh sighed and released my braid. “Listen kid. The reason you’re brave is because of Violet. That ability to fight from your life is Jaha reaching through your arms. Galiena is your childhood. And well, you know who I am. The big brother you never had, the guy who makes sure your love doesn’t scatter like feathers.”

Tears surged again and I wiped my face on my wet arms, the skin slicker than ever. “That’s why I can’t–”

He moved to sit beside me and put an arm around my hunched shoulders, “You keep missing the most important thing. The thing you won’t acknowledge.”

I kept silent and pressed my palms against my ears, the cold metal of my earrings raising goosebumps on my flesh. “Please don’t.”

“You created us. You had all the ingredients. You were just afraid of what you would become if you didn’t compartmentalize. It’s like what you do with people. You always see them compassionately, but at the same time you’re repulsed by the selfishness of humanity.”

I objected, “I’m not any better than anyone else.”

Keith held up one hand, “I know, I know. I’m not saying that. Remember that one dream you had? That one emotion you can’t stop revering? It’s love and you know it. You’re afraid you’re not good enough to protect it. Well, let me tell you. If you keep up this way, you’ll never be able to protect the ones you want. You’ll ruin your one dream.”

I pulled my braid over one shoulder and let it coil into my hand. I squeezed my fingers around it. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Because you’re broken into pieces. You have to accept that every one of us is you. That your creations are yourself. I won’t go away, darling. I’ll never leave you. You have me, and because of that, you are who you are. Just like I am the way you are.”

My legs curled to the side as I slid into his lap and rested my head on his thigh. I closed my eyes. “Just … just let me rest awhile.”

Keith pulled my bangs back from my brow, winding one of the longer strands around his pinky. “You’ve rested enough. Get up and go. You can beat this, I know you can.”

“Why do you have so much damn faith in me?”

Keith smiled and rested his hand on my shoulder, “Because, whether you want to admit it or not, you have faith in yourself. Because of that, you have hope. If you have hope, you have a future. I’m telling you again, look beyond yourself. Fight for the ones you love. Live your curious life well, because He’ll always be watching and we’ll always be here with our fists in the air rooting you to keep running for the finish line.”

I was getting tired. The sort of tired that sinks into your bones and spreads in an ebbing tide through the rest of you. “What’s past the finish line?” I murmured.

He brushed his knuckles along my jaw bone. “Who knows.”

Keith tipped his head back, lidding his eyes against the sun as he watched thick blotches of clouds roll through the sky.

Jasmine scrunched her fingers into her dress and leveled her gaze forward. “I wish there was something I could do.”

The fan snapped shut and touched Pearl’s throat, her smile indulging. “I don’t. This is how you’re meant to be.”

Jasmine felt her cheeks burning and worried the fabric in her hands, “I wish you had warned me about how love is. You gave me so many books with knights, princesses and pleasant endings. Each of them contained a little piece of a dream I wanted.”

Pearl arched her brows and eased back into her chair, folding one long length of her leg over the other. “My dear, there’s nothing I could have taught you about love outside of fiction and fairy tales. You talk to me like I should have warned you, prepared you, or given you instructions on how to experience it.”

“You should have! Maybe then, I wouldn’t have-” she holds a gloved hand just under her mouth, preparing to cover it at any moment. “If I had known I would have run away.”

Pearl closed her eyes.

Jasmine felt a sob building in her throat and swallowed it with a painful grimace. “Now I’m consumed. All I think about is the moment I see him again. I cannot even pin my hair without thinking of how he …”

“Unpinned it.” Pearl finishes.

Jasmine put both hands over her face, her fingers tight together as she covered her eyes, feeling her own breath rolling back against her cheeks. “Please don’t say such vulgar things.”

The chair creaked as Pearl took leave of it, kneeling in front of Jasmine. She began to smooth the wrinkles from the gauzy fabric. “You won’t think of it that way, in time. You’ll learn to appreciate those feelings, regardless of how they seem to have your heart in rough seas.”

Tears ran down Jasmine’s face until they stopped and soaked into her covered palms. “I don’t know what to do next.”

Pearl laid her head against the girl’s trembling knees, “That’s how you know it’s right.”

In her mouth was pandora’s box, a miniature sliver of a coffin beneath her tongue.

It was all honey when she was untouched. She did so much good. But that didn’t matter now, not in this lonely bathroom. For as much good as she did, the bad always found her. She didn’t know how to do bad. So the box opened and swallowed the vile. The tiger would always eat her, for she was too fearful to crush even an ant in her flight. The coffin swelled when the bad men came.

But it was sealed tight. The poison, now, was so great inside that she felt it blackening the sides of her teeth.

She raised her eyes through her bangs and watched herself under the stuttering glare of the light. There was a languid sway at her shoulders, even though she was fighting to hold still. If she moved, it blurred the lattice work of bruises and scars over her ribs and breasts. She got tired of looking, the coffin was close to trapping her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

Her bra was unclipped and dropped, revealing small breasts marred with inky fingerprints. Robotically, she stripped the rest of her clothing and then kicked it into a dirty corner far away from her. One sock lagged behind, sprawled in a half hunch like an inchworm.

She had waited too late to say it to them. Waited too long to fight. Now the poison was making the coffin groan, bloated. She hunched forward and crossed her skinny arms across her chest and lifted her eyes to the dusty mirror one last time. Her dry, cracked lips parted:

“No.”

The coffin exploded, driving broken splinters into the soft flesh of her tongue. A black, oily liquid as thick as syrup oozed from the corners of her mouth, wiggled between the small gaps between her teeth. It scorched the flesh of her throat until it was white ash.

Her legs buckled first, eyes bulging from behind her unwashed hair. As she fell, one hand clawed desperately at the rounded edge of the sink. The poison swirled like a tide, clogging her nostrils and eating away at the soft tissue.

She thought, as her mind grew misty and slow, I should’ve used this before.

Her fingers ticked off the sink, one by one, leaving a wet trail as her arm joined her crooked body on the floor.

I take a breath and put my head in my hands. I feel my hair slump over my fingers. I’ve reached the two roads and there’s no sign post. There’s no warnings. I can’t just walk straight ahead, there’s a dark gulf between them that I know is bottomless. Sitting at the point is no option either, my choice to remain still would rob the color from my hair and bleach my corneas bone white.

Either way is hard. Either way is perilous. One road welcomes me with willow trees and a path as soft as moss. The other is murky, uncertain of itself, in the space of a blink the curves ahead can twist into unconquerable loops. I’ve never taken the easy way out, that much I know about my character; I also know things have never been easy for me, and my triumphs over the many darknesses that have followed me since my childhood have served to make me resilient.

I know sometimes I step up to the arena to fight a battle that I know I cannot win. I take blow after blow, spitting out blood and teeth for a dream I’m not even optimistic about. I torture myself with the possibilities, I torture myself with what I’ve lost. I’m under the bright lights and I cannot see anything beyond the ropes keeping me inside. I tell myself I don’t need to be rescued: I beg to be rescued. I want to stop this brutality on my soul, I want to crawl away from the kicks battering at my ribs.

I want the path that makes me happy. I want. I want. I never knew I could want. I never knew I could want something for myself. My life has been by proxy, living in the smiles and tears of others. Now my body burns from the inside, calling out for the hand to lift me away from it all. My Lord saved my soul, now I want someone to save my life. I used to feel that it was weak to need, to open up, to use someone’s shoulder when I’m stumbling. I wanted to be the horse that steadfastly carried my loved ones to safe havens, crossing whatever perilous land ahead.

I don’t want to be a means to an end for anyone anymore. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want to be a saint. I just want to turn my face up into the autumn wind and not have tears running back towards my temples. I want to stop telling myself I’m alone, spinning away with no tether to the ground. If I am water, then always, I will fall back to earth. I have to remember that.

I want to be the rain that fills someone’s upturned hands. I want to be a precious heat inside of someone’s heart.

I want, I want, I want.

And thank God.

With considerable grace she slides from the table, her heels arching high into the air. “They hate you for your strength. Your unpredictability. Everything that you can do and undo. You don’t disappear well. Every box you outgrow.”

Now her fingers slide against calloused palms. “They resent your courage when they cannot move. They fear you because you are fearless.”

Carefully she pushed forward, tipping weight between two bodies. One slid forward. One slid back. “And here you want to shed your wings? You’re mad. Will you cut your talons and file your teeth? You can change everything ahead of you, you can conquer the universe.”

She felt resistance now, knowing that she could never break that balance. So instead, she fell forward into a chest that rose and fell ever so evenly. “Don’t let them tar and feather you. Don’t let their hateful labels stick. No one that loves you would want to push you to the ground. No one that cares for you would cut you just to see you bleed.”

“Run as hard and as fast as you can into the light. Let the water split beneath your feet and leave a hot mist behind you so they can never see where you go. Stop looking at them, their eyes are ivy around your feet. Don’t give up. You’re good. Please don’t ever give up.”

Water cut her across the face as she fell backward, shielding her eyes as the splash scattered blue gems. She felt a great wake in the air and stared over her shoulder.

“Keep moving, dear one, I’ve passed the torch to you.”

“Oof.” He adjusted his balance and shuffled through the tightly packed audience. “Quit grabbing my hair.”

Mary grinned wildly and squeezed her legs until her heels nipped in at his ribs, “Ya!”

Luke pursed his lips and drew them to the left. “I am not a horse.”

“You’re right. You’re more like a bull. Charge!” she rocked with impatience, the movement jarring her short hair along her jaw.

He gripped her calves and edged closer still to the railing. Luke took the annoyed stares of the jostled in stride. A crazy woman was driving him, what could he do?

Mary released his hair and drew deeply of the night air, the delightful smell of spent fireworks heavy in the July heat. “Oh wow. We’re gonna be able to see everything.” when Luke didn’t answer, she continued on. “I’ve always wanted to see this. The last time we were in the back of a truck, remember? It was so weird. We were all crushed together but ..”

Luke twisted his head, trying his best to see her expression above him.

“But we couldn’t even hold hands. It was tough back then, wasn’t it? All those people looking at the sky and we still didn’t have the nerve.”

He spread his feet a little wider. “You know, you could stand. We’re at the edge. There’s no one in our way.”

Mary’s knuckles rapped on his head. “But I wanted to see everything. I want to see the stars fade to black when the big fireworks start. I want to see that moment where they both exist. It means something to me, seeing man’s creation blooming beneath God’s.”

Luke raised his arms and hooked them into her armpits. Mary protested, “Don’t put me down yet! It hasn’t even started.” Regardless, he steadily plucked her from his shoulders and rested her down beside him.

Her lip trembled and she looked at him as if she had been betrayed by being unseated. “It doesn’t feel as real down here.”

He brushed his arm up along side her own and wound them together until their hands became entangled. “It’s real.” he said quietly, having felt hushed in the sudden silence around them. The crowd had collectively ceased their jubilation, anticipating the renown finale.

“But if I can’t see both, what’s the point. I want back up there.” she pointed to above his head.

Luke reached for her other hand and held it with the same tenderness.

“You can see both.”

Mary looked at him inquisitively, “How?”

Luke lowered his head until his forehead pressed against her own. “You could look at me.”

The shower of fireworks went off in a series of rapid fire shots, creating a waterfall of white light that poured towards the dark river below. It illuminated everything and turned the glow between their lips to gold.

Dessie, the sulky room-mate, flicked a spent butt at a clay ashtray. Another miss. It only added to the dozens of other misses. For all practical purposes, her ashtray was the entire planet earth. She dug her tongue into the gap between her teeth, mumbling around the awkward twist of her tongue. “Of courf you can.”

“Really?”

Dessie spit free the food lucky enough not to get ground to digestible quality against those nicotine stained choppers. “Can’t. You can’t.”

Keith snapped back around and pretended to focus on the spread of notes on his desk. Lyrics, poems, stories and letters. The summary of a man’s desperation.

“You know why y’ can’t? Because you’re fucking lazy.” It sounded remotely like a compliment, coming from her. “You think once you rode off into the sunset with her that’s all it was gonna take for a happy life?”

Keith searched for a pencil. To stab. To write. Both actions were achingly similar in their goal.

Dessie continued, “Fuck, you little bitch, I even gotta work at my addiction– remind myself I always need it. Sometimes I get real better, you know? I can think straight and my eyes are wide open. Then you know what I gotta do? I gotta tell myself, the world is real great in full color surround sound .. but it also blows. You know why? I’m gonna ask you a lot of questions, you prick. So don’t interrupt me. When I see the world in that full spectrum, I know I ain’t ever going to fucking belong to it. I’m never going to enjoy some candle lit dinner. I don’t wanna ride on a motherfucking boat. I don’t want to do any of it. You know what that’s like, kid? Knowing that the world is fucking fantastic? Then you realize, fuck, I’m not even interested. I don’t wanna pet dolphins. I don’t wanna rock climb. I don’t want a job. This beautiful gorgeous world can just kiss my ass. So I dim it. I dim it down. I pop anything I’ve got to knock the color down, so I won’t be tempted by what I’m missing. What’s missing is inside me. The world is full of beauty and I’m not even fucking interested. What does that make me? Why are the most profound fucking things in this universe so boring? So I jack my brain. I scramble my insides. I make my body the adventure land. I make my veins a roller coaster and my lungs home to thick curls of dazzling violet smoke.”

He was silent, his pen bleeding pregnant drops of ink, the liquid blossoming and unfurling in impossibly intricate snowflakes.

Another cigarette received the communion of fire and she put it between her lips with the relish of a fanatic. She was a woman far from faith, but she thrived on ritual. Pills were the numbers on the clock, dropping down her throat as the short hand dispensed them upon the hour. Ironic, really. Even when man believed they had harnessed time, they still insisted on the final insult of calling the watchers of the hours ‘hands’.

Dessie pursed her lips and sucked so deeply that the cherry of her cigarette galloped towards the stained filter. “Course, this isn’t bout me. But maybe it is. If you were in a better mood, I wouldn’t be your room-mate. You’d have that air head in here trying to put fucking lisa frank stickers all over your pussy love letters.”

Keith lurched forward and twisted round, his hands curling, gripping and thickening with battle blood. “I want her! I want her more then anything in my whole life! And I fucking screw it up! I didn’t work. I brought her back. I brought her into my city. I saved her. She saved me! We did ride off into the sunset. We ran into the sunlight .. and .. and..”

“And you lost her.” Dessie murmured, her dark eyes rolling upward as streams of smoke poured from her nostrils.

He slammed his hands down on to the table and knocked the cup of pencils away. They clattered to the floor like hail. He remained there for many heartbeats, his body still, his muscles taunt. The only movement came from the paper beneath him, as it swelled and distorted beneath the fall of his tears. “I want her.” he whispered hoarsely.

“I wanted her my whole life. I wanted her even before she came to my city. I felt her out there, spinning off into space, waiting for me to have the strength to lasso her down. I thought it was enough. It wasn’t. I failed her. I failed her so terribly. I thought the strength of my love was enough. It was me that wasn’t enough. My pride and my fucking arrogance. And now ..”

Keith shoved the drafting board forward. It swung high and crashed with the typical result of any furniture made of particle board. Therefore: It broke into several pieces, all of which undoubtedly would only be fixed by shipping it in from Singapore. The paper did not follow, no. It floated down like disappointed angels, reaching upward, begging to be saved. Dessie watched from her position, her bony butt settled firmly on the arm of a ratty couch.

“And now she’s gone. She’s gone. I can’t even say those words and have them reach my heart. Everyone keeps asking. Everyone keeps asking if I’m okay, if I’m gonna make it, if I’m going to move on. But I can’t. I can’t move on without her, I can’t live without her! I have a purpose. I know it, Dessie. I know my fucking purpose. It’s to be that guy that never gives up. It’s to be that man that would face any shame or humiliation to get her back. I know I love her, why should I doubt that? Without her, my head is sick. My heart is sick. Maybe this is self preservation, I don’t know. But I’m going to find her. I’m going to do whatever it takes.”

Dessie expertly rolled the sodden filter over her lower lip to the far left corner of her mouth. “Whatever it takes? You sure you’re up for that, cowboy?”

Keith turned way from the calamity of art supplies at his feet and faced Dessie head on, his jaw strung as tight as street light stabilizers. “You don’t know me. You don’t know us. She’s somewhere in someone else’s city, and I’m going to find her. I’m going to either bring her back or come to her! I have never loved another woman this way. She moves me, she moves me to be better. She challenges me. She pushes me. For all the wrong I’ve done in my life, she still loves me. I don’t care that she’s not here right now. I don’t care about the fights. What I care about is finding my soulmate. I will go to the very heavens and push those ancient stars through the universe until they align for us. I want to look up at the sky and know that big guy up there couldn’t, even in his glory and infinite power, stop me from finding her. I will make this right.”

The cigarette tipped and its burden of ash floated towards the floor. Dessie was watching him carefully.

“You know it’s going to be hard.”

Keith reached for his coat and shrugged it on.

“She saved me when I was in the darkest place of my life. She came for me.”

The girl stretched out one leg on the couch, the rips in her hosiery widening. “This is different. You know what’s happened since then. The rules have changed.”

Keith pockets his wallet. “I know.”

Dessie cut her eyes towards the door. “You’re still going, aren’t you?”

He shoved his feet into his boots and laced them with military efficiency. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Keith stood and placed his hand on the knob of the door. “Because she, out of all the dreams that float up to God during the nighttime, she’s the only one that blinds His eyes with her radiance.”

“She’s a perfect dream. Because she is the only dream that can come true.”

Her companion sunk deeper into the half egg-shell chair, “Why can’t you just say how you feel?”

She smiled, an ivory flash showing between two fingers that framed her lips in a horizontal peace sign. “But that is how I feel.”

“You’re a human being, not a time of day. Though with how weird you are, I’m starting to doubt the former part of my observation.”

The hundred year old seat bottom creaked beneath her as she rose to her feet and then stretched onto the balls of her feet. “That’s how I got here you know.” Two fingers came up and tapped on the shallow dent of her right temple.

“How?”

She closed one eye, grinned, and arched her thumb to resemble the hammer of a gun.

“Doubt.”

She stood there with a sullen expression, watching the duplicate machine across the street count down.

Where she was from, you never had to wait to go. The concept was alien because her people’s independence had plenty of room to stretch out and grow.

She was angry that the city was more honest. It wrote unspoken rules and drew invisible lines.

Tucking her thumbs, she waited.

The hand turned to numbers. Somewhere, on the other side, time had run out.

Her shoulder bent inward as she was jostled forward, and she begrudgingly stepped into the street. Just even listening to the electric humming over her head felt like a betrayal.

But she …

She had never felt so alone than the moments she stood there waiting.

The light that sluiced between the buildings blinded her, and cupping one hand over her forehead she proceeded forward.

Ah…God, it was so bright.

I laid there, breathing in the chalky dust. In some last stubborn act, my arm was still looped across the rough bottom rung.

The crackling of my dusty gloves were louder then I ever would’ve thought right now.

“Yeah, somethin’ like that.”

He leaned over his fence, muddy sweat filtering through the stiff grains of his beard like the process of shifting. “Gonna get up?”

I sunk my head back into the greasy, untangled mop beneath my skull and closed my burning eyes. “Maybe.”

He flicked a heavy glob of mud from the cleft of his chin, “You’re still on about the ashes thing, ain’t you?”

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.” I quote, voice dry and bitter. “You get to burn and twist off in papery molten capes towards the sky.”

The mud strikes a clump of her hair. “So, Dust – how you doin’ with that then?”

I hunched forward, lifting my chin to draw my eyes towards the dark skies above. The movement revealed the pale ribbons of pasty flesh between each ring of soot on my skinny neck. “Dust.” I whispered, again, pushing away from the fence and into the ragged terrain.

“It was never Dust to Ashes.”

I walk away from him now, the earth’s heartbeat lancing up through the dry soil to strike me as yet another artery for substance. It’s supposed to hurt a little more than this, but nothing…

After all, I am Dust.