The only satisfying heat to my dry and aching lips is the sun.

7:00pm. Big. Hot. More satisfying than the cool nights I hide from.

The only rushing lust I long to feel is the skin breaking wind.

Fast. Vicious. Singing songs into my head. Stirring my body more than hands.

I don’t need your body like you need mine.

I need the earth. I need the empty stars.

I’m ebbing your flow, pushing back your forward motions.

But everything must flow.

I need you like the earth.

But you’re nothing like the earth.

I am rock and you are man, chipping away until I reach your shape.

I am the earth.

I need the earth.

The only heat I long to feel is the sun.

Paul part 2

Paul is still here with me. He never really left… he did for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, but I got lonely again and found my lips constantly moving until I willed him to appear again. They did eventually clean up the back lot of the park with the rusted old equipment and it no longer exists. 

I thought that the demolition of me and Paul’s secret place would make me better, make me forget him, make me finally live in peace, but it only made me worse. My psychotic episodes began one very sad and sleepy night. Being sad is very exhausting, and being exhausted makes me sad. It’s a never ending cycle. When it first happened, I blamed it on the exhaustion. But it kept happening again and again, every single day, each night at 8:02pm, like fucking clockwork. My head would spin and my eyes would turn black and I could hear Paul calling out to me again, begging me, pleading, desperate to be with me again.

But then I had a sudden realization with his voice… that maybe he was real after all, that he was in trouble and needed my help. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. Maybe he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. 

And I finally saw Paul again. And I fell in love with this boy all over again. I came home from school one day and he was just sitting on my bed reading that same Shakespeare book he always carries around. I did cry when I saw him, and I jumped on top of him and hugged him and showered his face with kisses and just cried and cried, shouting at him for leaving me. He said he would never leave me again, that he would always be at my side. I was so happy.

But there was something strange and different about Paul. His once blue eyes had turned dark and sunken, somber in our newfound happy reunion. I dismissed this, anyways, I was too fucking happy. But the way he felt… too boney and cold… the way his fingers locked around me, the way he so easily gave me bruises, the way he leered at me in the corner of my room…

I dismissed all of this again.

Until his eyes were all black and he stopped talking. He became depressed. I would come home from school and find him under my covers staring at the door with his black eyes. I wondered what could have made his eyes so black, kind of like how mine were. 

And now he taunts me, pushes me around, forces me to have sex, puts his boney hands on me. But I don’t really care, I won’t lose him again. The only thing that really seems to calm him is when we read Shakespeare together. He comes outside the house with me sometimes, his hand always placed so lightly on the back of my neck, whispering into my ear. 

Today he took me to the planetarium, one of my favorite places. He said that when I die, I can join him and we can make a house out of stars. I smile at the fact that he knows how much I love lights and stars around my house, and it makes me excited to think that he wants me in the future. He was sweet today, and his eyes were blue and white and he returned to the boy I fell in love with at the park. 

On the way home he says he wants to take me to where he died. To prove that he was real. We walk to a bridge in a beautiful wooded area over the river that runs through town. He said he jumped off the bridge in the dead of winter one night because he was lonely. And when he died he found me. I made him whole again. Like he made me whole.

“I want to jump, too,” I say. 

This boy’s smile lights up. He’s so beautiful when he smiles.

“I’ll jump with you and hold your hand. It’s not that scary,” he says.

And I climb over the railing and stand on top of this old bridge with him. I turn to him with a smile on my face, expecting to see the same, but instead I am greeted with the black eyed Paul with the twisted smile, and he pushes me, and I fall, alone, again. When I come to, I’m in chains, and Paul is dragging me, and I realize once and for all, that I am Paul, and he was my destroyer, and my savior from myself.

Hands

All I could really think about in that moment in the back of his car was hands. Not his hands exploring my body with an open invitation, but the ones that I had forgotten about so many years ago, the ones that invaded my body as a young girl. My mind switched off and I was no longer a happy eighteen year old girl in the backseat of her lovers car. I had dropped myself back into that suppressed memory with so many holes in it.

The darkness… the tight leotard… the big hands that felt alarming to an unknowing little girl. The hands that were warm and dry and forceful. The hands that hurt me in ways I didn’t understand. The hands that took things that weren’t theirs to take. 

How could I have known? But most importantly, how could I have forgotten? All these years and just one single touch has triggered every child’s worst nightmare. Was it real? Did it even ever happen? Was I making it up? Of course I was making it up, I had to have been making it up.

I was slung back into reality, where panic rose in my throat. Shoving hands away from me, suddenly feeling the real intension of what I thought to be loving hands. Fear and regret filled my stomach as I reacted. Confused and embarrassed from my outburst, I fled the scene and left my friends to mingle with the strangers that filled my head with irrational fears.

Just ignore it, girl. It will go away. Just lock yourself away for a while and think about it. This is stupid. You’re stupid. That could never happen. 

A week of seclusion. 

My fears were put away momentarily.

Until the next ounce of affection made its way into my life. And all I could feel were those hands.

For months of avoidance and psychotic episodes, the fear of hands on my body grows stronger and stronger. The only thing that can really temporarily take away the memories are drugs and sleep.

But whenever I thought I had gotten even remotely better, it would come crashing back down. I turn everything to shit. 

Then one day I got it into my pretty little mind that if I stop caring about anything and everything, I would have the power over this fear. That no one could ever touch me again if I didn’t let anybody in.

But there’s no ending to this story yet. Because I’m right in the fucking middle of it. And there will never be an end.

Ancestor Reverence

Ever since I was a little girl, I would always look forward to going to Utah to visit my grandparents and my great grandmother. Coming from a very large Mormon family, ancestry has always been an important part of my visiting them. Although I personally was not raised Mormon, I have always been a part of my family’s traditional remembrance through story telling that usually goes along with an artifact or a photo. My family has always revered our loved ones by story telling, like these very fond memories of my great grandmother, Zelma Tinsel Wicker Duffin.

One day when I was about four or five years old, I was at my great grandmothers house and saw an old black and white picture of the same house with a dozen boys and a little girl standing in front of it. I was fascinated by the picture and immediately ran outside to look at the house now and notice the differences. I asked my great grandmother about it. Though she had become legally blind decades before, she knew the picture well. It was of her and her eleven older brothers on the day they first moved into the house in 1904, when she was only two years old. She told me about each of them and pulled out objects from her wall unit that belonged to some of them. 

They all seemed so lovely to me and I wanted to know more about them, but there were just so many stories of them to keep track of. My grandma took notice of my interest in them, and planned a trip to the cemetery where they were all buried. The next day she took me, my brother, two of my cousins, my mom, and two of my aunts to the cemetery with three huge baskets of flowers. She took us to the graves of each of the brothers in the picture, their wives, their passed children, and my great grandfather. We tidied up the weeds and dirt from each headstone and arranged some flowers around the base. My great grandmother used to take my mom, my aunts and uncle, and their cousins to the graves when they were children and when she still had her sight. We ventured back to my great grandmothers house and tended to the neglected garden that had been there forever. She lived in that house for ninety- four years until she died in 1998. Whenever I’m back in Utah visiting my grandparents, I always want to drive past the house and remember all the stories she told me.

In my own wall unit at home, I have many of her things: an elegant powder jar that plays a tune that she used every day she was married; a glass figurine of a bluebird given to her on one of her mission trips; and one of the most important items that we have is the family’s chocolate pot. It belonged to my great great grandmother and sat in the most prestige spot in my great grandmothers wall unit. When my mom was in high school, my great grandmother gave her the chocolate pot and a letter. The letter tells about my great great grandmother and how the chocolate pot was always meant for my mom. My great great grandmother received the chocolate pot when they moved to Utah from North Carolina. She was an important part of the Mormon Church in Bountiful, Utah as the town was being developed and the women of the Ward would often drink hot chocolate together from the pot. The letter goes into great detail about how she was a “woman of visions.” I asked my mom what this meant, and she told me story about how when two of her sons were out hunting, she suddenly realized that one of them was going to be shot. She called the doctor and he arrived just in time for one of the sons, Stanley, to be carried inside. He had indeed been shot and the doctor was able to get the bullet out in time. He had supposedly died for a few minutes but then miraculously came back to life. She had a vision that her son was shot and was able to save him just in time, and clairvoyance does seem to run in my family. When I have children, my mom will give the chocolate pot to one of my future daughters, and it’s meant to be passed down to granddaughters in my family for generations in the future.

Another very important artifact of my ancestors that I will always be fascinated with, is a set of diaries belonging to my pilgrim ancestors that came with Brigham Young to Salt Lake City. I was never able to read the handwriting very well when I was younger, but a few years ago I went through my grandparents things on a visit and found them. Two small journals almost falling apart, with beautiful long hand script. One diary appears to be as if whoever it belonged to was writing to her husband or a dear friend. Each page is a short little entry telling about the uneventful journey, maybe a change in weather or a change in scenery. The other diary was always quite confusing, and I’m still not sure what it is. It seems to be a log in book of some sorts, maybe the number of people in the Church each day or the number of citizens in the newly established town. It still fascinates me that I have such an old and important piece of history and key to my heritage, although I don’t know my exact relation to them. 

Story telling has always been such an important part of my family. It’s how we stay in touch with our roots and how we know that a lot of the things in our homes all have stories to them. This coming July I plan to do some sort of big reverence to my great grandmother, seeing as she would have been one-hundred and ten years old. Perhaps I’ll begin writing the book I have always wanted to write about her and my family, compiling all the stories that I know.  

Touch me

Leaning back into my chair I could see all the colors these people around me were making.  I looked at the joint in my hand and slowly inhaled the rest of it in one hit. I let the smoke roll out of my mouth and nose as the colors shifted with each word everyone spoke, the natural melodic tones of their sentences overwhelming in the cold winter night. Someone took the joint from my hand and replaced it with a cigarette, already lit for me. I could tell by the soft forest greens and dark blues of the voice telling me to take it easy was you. You were sitting right next to me, and I could feel your eyes.

Touch me. Please, just fucking touch me. I spent the next ten minutes feeling your energy and the small bumps into me you made as you talked to the other people around us eccentrically. Your hand then lingered on the seat right next to my thigh. Touch me. Your finger flashed to my flesh for the faintest moment. My heart was racing so fast and so hard in my chest, I wasn’t sure if it was the drugs pumping through my blood or the fact that more than anything, in that moment in time, I just wanted you to touch me.

I could hear a voice trying to break through the protective bubble around my thoughts, calling my name. 

There was another voice inside my bubble though, that was telling me the truth. That was telling me they wanted me more than you ever could. Their feverish smiles with their sharp teeth came crashing though my brain in a shudder shock of pain. 

The voice outside my head was real though. It called my name again, and shook my body, this time. I came back to reality. I saw the cigarette in my hand had burned down to the filter and the ashes were sitting in a fine pile on my bare flesh. I tried to move to brush it off, but I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t move. I was still waiting for you to touch me. My body was still tensed in anticipation for the moment I was willing you to do with my brain. I just kept staring at the ash pile on my leg. 

I could feel your voice passing slowly from your mouth and onto my face as you told me strange things, asked me strange things, the colors that hit my face weren’t right anymore. They were red and black with worry. 

Touch me.

My lids suddenly felt heavy and I blinked a single heavy blink, keeping my eyes closed. Trying to feel again. I felt the tickle of the ashes on my leg, the hotness still lingering and scaring my flesh slowly. I felt my head turn slowly to the soothing colors washing upon my face in the cold night and opened my eyes. You were looking at me, then you weren’t, you were looking at my leg. Your movements were too slow to comprehend. The colors were moving too fast to match with your mouth moving lazily at me. I just stared at your mouth for what seemed to be the longest time, wondering what you were doing.

Then I felt you touch me. Time caught up to me as I was stunned from my lulling drug induced day dreams. Time sped up. I caught everything I had missed in those ten- fifteen minutes I was listening to the colors of voices. When I had heard my voice it was varies people asking me things, asking if I wanted more, asking who was doing what and when, asking if the food was ready. And then you said my name. And again. And again. You took holy of my shoulder and shook me, which caused the long trail of ashes from the cigarette to fall on my leg. “Oh shit,” you said. I turned to you. You asked me if I was alright, told me I had been saying the words “less to do” over and over again. You told me to get the ash off my leg. You yelled in my face as I slowly leaned into your face as I was transfixed by you magic mouth moving. Then you brushed off the ash with your hand, quick at first, then slowly and deliberately, as if coaxing me back to life by rubbing my thigh. 

It all happened too quickly, I wasn’t even there to enjoy it. By the time I could react and put my hand on yours, you took it the wrong way and pulled back. I kept my grip on your hand though. Still holding onto it as you put it back onto the seat away from my body.

Panic rose in my throat as I felt my heart beating again. I tried my very hardest to move but there was something holding me down. It was your arm across my body, and your ere saying something about keeping calm. I didn’t know what you were talking about, but I needed to go to my bed. I dug my nails into your arm and you retracted. I floated back into the house and circled over to the kitchen sink. I began washing my hands and I saw you walk into the house after me. I could still feel the grimy ash all over my hands. 

“Are you okay? You’re on a whole other planet right now,” you said. 

“I’m just really high,” I said, “I don’t like it.”

You leaned in closer to me, your hip now adjacent to mine against the counter. 

Touch me.

You put your hand on my back. Pure ecstasy in a state of panic. You rubbed my back. 

“What can I do?” You asked me. 

God, what couldn’t you do at this point to make my world seem both wonderful and horrific all at the same time? I stopped washing my hands and had dried them off at this point. I was just standing there saying nothing. I didn’t know what to say, really. You stopped rubbing my back and scoffed in some pissed off way people do when ignored. 

“Wait,” I said. I grabbed your hand and jerked you back. “Just… touch me. Stay with me.” 

Somewhere between my bedroom and the kitchen sink we made a revelation about where this was going and what was going to happen. The inevitability of the situation rose in the air and all the other partygoers could sense it, too, as we walked past with linked fingers. It wasn’t until we passed the shadowy creatures on the stairs that I remembered my high thoughts from before. They were waiting again. I made myself vulnerable again. I let go of your hand and clung to the wall at the top of the stairs, seeing the figures waiting for me at the door.

All the things I expected you to say or do because of those silly shows I’ve wrapped myself in, you never said. You never really did anything. You took my hand and dragged me from the wall into my room, where you left the door open and sat down on the floor with my guitar. You played me songs as you stared at me rocking back and forth on my bed. I began shaking and convulsing again, the way I usually do when I’m upset. I started freaking out. You told me to get Under the covers and close my eyes. You closed the door and turned off the lights. I felt you climb onto my bed and you started to play me a song, softly and gently. I could feel myself falling asleep, but I just wanted you to touch me.

And like magic, once again. You stopped playing and ran your hand through my hair. I fell asleep, as long as I knew you were touching me, I knew I was safe. 

I woke up the next morning to you still in my bed. I was being held by you, so protectively.  You woke up and were shocked by your surroundings at first.

“Did you stay here the whole time?” I asked you.

“No,” you confessed, “Once you were asleep I went back to the party for a few hours. I came back up here to check up on you and.. well my ride left me here when I came up. So I stayed…” You seemed embarrassed, especially by the fact that my face was enclosed tightly to your chest by your own arms.

“Oh. What time is it?”

“Only seven,” you said, checking the clock, “I’ve only been asleep for three hours?”

“Go ahead and sleep more, I’m going to, and I’m in no hurry to kick you out.”

You stare at me long and hard, parting your lips a few times in a failed attempt to admit something. You reach out from under the bed and take out my journal. 

“I found this when you were sleeping…” You said.

“You fucking read my journal?” I felt disgusting.

All we did at that moment was look at each other, and look at the book. I snatched it back and put it under my pillow. After a few moment you grab me into a hug and kiss my forehead.

“Just don’t kill yourself,” you said.

I consider this. I consider this. You’re touching me, so there’s no reason for me to at this moment.

“Okay.”

But only for that moment. I won’t.

I remember when I was three years old, maybe younger, maybe older, my family was driving a long distance. In the middle of the night- to my toddler mind- we pulled over at the side of the road in a panic. The lights in our van turned on and I was too small to look out the window at what was happening. My dad ran outside and I remember he was gone for a long time. I must have fallen asleep then because that’s all I remember.

When I was older and asked my mother about it, she said that a couple had been driving and flipped and we saw it. My dad ran out to go help them. 

I remember seeing an image of a young girl being helped out of the car, all bloody. I imagined her face to be very white and perfect, with perfectly straight shorter blonde hair that was plastered to her face with the blood dripping from her head. A yellow shirt and jeans. I never saw her, but this was the memory I had of her. 

I often wonder why it’s so clear, this strange memory that I never even saw. I was much too young to understand what was going on or to make up the images of a bloody young girl staggering out of a toppled car as my father grabbed her arm and pulled her through the wreck. 

Skyline part 1

I live on floor 637 of the Skyline building, probably somewhere over Los Angeles- or, where the city used to be. The Skyline was built in the year 2345 in order to house the over populated world. It was said that there were over 20 billion people living on earth at that time and about a hundred different Skyline buildings were built altogether. Some people continued to live on ground, others were sent up to space stations, and others were sent to live in the Skylines. I think that they have about a thousand floors, but I don’t know what the others are like. We lost all communication to any other Skylines after a major power outage during the Plague of 2412. All the Skylines were closed off from people living on the ground, in order to keep our people clean of the Plague. I don’t really know what caused the blackout, but I do know that one of the space stations power got lost as well and it came crashing back down to Earth. I don’t know what happened to the rest of the space stations, or any of the other Skylines, or any of the people living on the ground. I think after the first couple decades of isolation that we gave up hope of a perfect world again and started living in our own world.

It’s currently 2676.

Something that you have to understand about Skyline LA is that it’s about as far and wide as LA was probably. It’s as wide as a city. We all are citizens of our own district, which consist of about a hundred floors. Since I live on floor 637, I belong to district 6. We all have district passports and jobs and money and reward points and credits, which are necessary if we want to travel different districts. We have farms on certain floors. Factories. Hospitals. Education. We’re all so fine here, it’s hard to believe that any sort of disaster happened and is possibly still happening.

When I was fourteen, I saw the ground for the first time. I think it was the first time for everyone seeing the ground, actually. There is always a thick layer of fog or clouds at around the district 3 area of the building, which is the first non restricted district. District 1 and 2 belong are strictly forbidden, supposedly because it’s unknown if there are still people with the plague walking around, so we try and distance ourselves from them as much as possible. But when I was fourteen, the fog suddenly cleared for a day. Everyone bought tickets for an exclusive look at the ground through the glass floored balcony in an part of the building that was intended to be a club when it was first built. Me and my family gathered all our credits and bought our tickets as soon as we heard the news and started the long district transferring elevator journey to district 3. 

I remember getting out of the big elevator and entering a crowd of mass chaos. Hundreds- maybe even thousands of people were in a huge stringing line going in and out of old, unused rooms on the entire floor. We got there at a good time, too, because about an hour later people were cut off from going in the elevators. The line moved quickly for the amount of people that were there, and after about five hours of standing in a line, I entered the big glass room. It was like being inside of an ice cube or flying through the open air. It was frightening for everyone to look under their feet and see nothing up a few feet of dirty glass and thousands of feet to the ground. When we got to the very edge of the glass room, we were given a few minutes to look at everything. A lot of people got down on their hands and knees and shouted out things with joy as they pointed at things they had never seen before but in pictures and movies. It was surreal. It was just like I had seen in movies, except still. The little dots on the gray lines between the multi toned blocks never moved. I suppose those were cars on streets that were left when the chaos of the plague hit. I stood up and looked out of the glass walls to the horizon of the rest of the abandoned city and saw it all. The buildings, the trees, the ocean, everything. And then I thought, “this can’t be it, this can’t be it all… we can’t be the only ones left after all this time.” And I only ever discussed this with myself. As children growing up we often asked those things to our teachers and parents and elders, just as they did when they were growing up. But they always told us the same thing- the only thing that they could say: “You’re right. But there’s nothing we can do about it. We just don’t know and we just can’t take that kind of risk.” And we learned to leave it at that, because that’s the only thing we did know. 

Back at our apartment that night, I remembered my little brother asking my parents the same repeated questions, with them answering the same repeated answers. I sat at the window at night and looked at the stars for the first time in a while and thought about the world. I replayed movies about space and the ocean and cities and wished and ached for something more than this building for a very long time after that night. My parents became concerned with me and thought I was obsessed with “fantasy,” and they sent me to talk to a counselor about my problem. I got the same spiel as always and was directed to some universities to look into a career in engineering, seeing as I had an interest in “innovation and creativity,” and that I could “help create new technology to better our peoples future.” 

I had thought that idea was just a load of crap. For the next two years I spent all my time in the libraries and museums, learning about the world and what we lost, wondering about what could have been and what we could restore. One day when I was talking to one of the librarians I befriended about what could have been, she just smiled big at me as I rambled on and on, opening books and pointing out things that matched other things and whatnot, sharing my ideas with her. She just smiled and smiled until I was done making my point, and she held my face in her hands and beamed a smile like a proud mother. “Oh, if only everyone shared your wisdom and curiosity. Maybe if everyone grew up wondering what might have been, then maybe we’d actually have a chance of getting out there again,” she said to me. That got me thinking.

That day when I got home, I announced to my parents that I wanted to go to university to become a teacher. When I was sixteen I was accepted to a local university.

Today, I am a seventeen year old part time teacher, part time student. I get to teach my own fifth grade class while still going to school and apply what I learn each day to my teaching. I’m what a lot of people call an experimental teacher, and me and my students learn from each other. A lot of my kids have liberal parents and have signed a release form allowing me to teach their children to think of innovating ideas for the future and question everything around them. It’s not really a respected profession to my elders, but I’m teaching future generations how to save our people, and they do respect that of me. I really love my job. 

When I walked in my classroom, all my kids were at the window looking up towards the sky. One kid was holding a book and pointing out the window trying to identify things.

“What are you guys doing?” I ask them. 

“Trying to figure out what that thing is that’s moving in the sky!” said one of my little girls.

“What?” I move over to the window and look out to where they are all pointing. It looked like a black cross moving in and out of the clouds. I recognize it as a plane from the books and I grab the book from my students hands. Sure enough, it was a plane. I was in disbelief. I thought that they were all rusted or disintegrated on the ground by now. I ran over to my desk and called for someone, anyone, that would know what to do. I called the principle of the school and shouted that there was an airplane and he connected me to one of the governors of our district. 

Today, everything changed. Today, everything got complicated.

Risking it all

The sky is just so unreal, it seems. It’s so unreachable. I stretch out my left arm and feel the grass scratch my skin in contrast to my right hand over his warm, soft hand on my belly. My head bobs up and down slowly with each breath that he takes and I can feel his heart in my ear. I know that he’s angry.

“I have to leave,” I say, and begin to get up. “I can’t be here anymore.” They’ll be looking for me soon, once they find out I left them. I know that my punishment will be severe; leaving the Order is… unheard of, it’s the only life we know, and without the Order there is nothing. Or at least, that’s what they want us to believe. 

I’m suddenly aware of how hot it really is, the way my dress sticks to my back, the way his damp hair clings to his forehead. I look around me and I realize how trapped I really am in this heat and in this city, and I’m desperate to find a way out.

“I’m not coming back…” I chew my words slowly, measuring each sound on my tongue, foreign to my mouth. He stares at me, unchanging, and I can tell he doesn’t know what to say without yelling at me. 

He opens and closes his mouth a few times, his frustration rising to the surface and caused his face to turn read and his neck veins to pop.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” He finally yells at me, “You’ve broken almost every single law! Murder, break in, robbery, treason, and worst of all, you’ve caused a major uproar among the townspeople. They’re starting to think for themselves, and talk to one another. As much as I love what you did and what you’re starting here, I hate that it was you. How could you do that to yourself? To me?”

He was right. I ruined everything for myself and for us. We can no longer get married because I have to run away- something that nobody has tried in over twenty years out of fear. He was completely right. And I was so afraid. But it was necessary! These people were just allowing the order to torture and them and herd them around like cattle. I needed them to start thinking for themselves, or at least differently- my way….

Before I even started opening my mouth in the first place, I figured out a way to escape the walls. The walls have kept me in my whole life. I used to be fine with this, hearing stories of the outside world and how everybody is crazy and diseased from the bombs. That even still, people can become sick from the people who were sick, hundreds of years later. I used to believe it all, just like everybody else did, until the stranger came walking through the wooded area behind the factory last year. Plenty of people- including me- came in contact with this strange man in his strange clothes and never got any kind of illness. The Order’s explanation to this was that we had probably built up an immunity from the air, since we weren’t in complete confinement. I didn’t buy that one bit. I would have if I wasn’t the one to first see the man and talk to him and know that he wasn’t sick at all. He described the illness as something of the dead roaming the earth. I didn’t really believe that either, but I figured it was safer to believe somebody other than the order, somebody who has been in the infected world their entire life. I asked him how he got in unseen, and he told me about a door in a bush. I held onto that unrealistic piece of information in hope that it would serve me use in the future.

As soon as I brought him out to the town with the rest of my friends who helped me give him food and water, the Order captured him and took him to the prison. We all waited in anticipation for the inevitable gun shot that was rarely heard. We heard it within minutes of him being taken away. 

After long, hard consideration of the incident, I concluded that the Order didn’t want to keep him around for a reason. They didn’t fear his infection since they didn’t quarantine anyone that was near him. They didn’t want information out of him because they probably already knew everything. The Order knew everything. Everything that we didn’t know. We knew nothing! The only thing we knew was that the Order was safe and the Order was right and the Order will always protect us and there was no need to question it. 

I began to question it. I questioned everything. And I started a riot and a scene and made others question it. 

….And that was why they will soon want me dead once they realize it was me all along.

And that is why I have to leave my fiancé forever, unless he changes his mind within the next five minutes to leave what is comfortable and right and come with me and face the unknown. 

“I’m sorry I did this. I’m sorry I took a stand, but I’m really not sorry. I love you, I really do, and that’s why I want you to come with me,” I beg him. He wipes the sweat from his upper lip and turns to face the town below us, waiting for the commotion of the Order searching for me. Yet it is still peaceful.

“I… I can’t do this with you anymore. I can’t deal with all these lies and secrets anymore. You need to go, and I’m telling you this because I love you and want you to be safe. But if you love me you won’t jeopardize my life. I love you,” he says. He is stern. And I’m crying.

“You won’t stand up for me? The woman you love?”

“Why did you have to throw away everything we have in the first place? Huh?”

“I’m doing this for us, for our future, for everyones future!”

“You did this for your own selfish reasons.”

“Maybe it only appears that way to you because you’ve yet to see what’s really going on here. There is an entire world out there that is still thriving, and you know it, and you’re just afraid to let yourself taste it. You can go ahead and sit on your ass and do the same mundane farm work everyday of your life with your clueless seamstress wife and your innocent brainwashed children, but I’m not going to stay here and wait around to see you throw your mind away. If you don’t want me anymore, I’m not staying. I’m going out there to finally live.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me with sadness and confusion in his eyes. I can’t do or say anything else to try and convince him to go away with me, so with that I turn around and start walking. I don’t dare turn around. I just keep walking. 

I go behind the factory and retrieve the bag and shoes I’ve kept hidden behind the rose bushes and force myself not to look back. I make sure the coast is clear and run into the wooded area. I hide behind a tree and figure out how to put on the shoes. We don’t wear shoes here; everything is soft and grassy and there’s really no need for shoes if we just stay in the town. I found the shoes in the basement of the factory a few weeks ago. They were black with dirty rubber covering the toes. They went up passed my ankles and were a little big and uncomfortable and unnatural, but they would do me just fine. I was lucky to find some anyways. 

I begin walking and try to find the bushes the stranger was talking about. A door in a bush. It just doesn’t make any sense. As I walk farther I begin to see that the wooded area actually turns into a rather large forest and as time passes I run into a wall of thick ivy about half an hour later. I guess that this is where it must be, and I dig into the wall looking for a door. No door. I dig and walk and dig and walk until I feel something different in the wall. A door? Maybe. I tug. It’s indeed a door! I finally found my way out, my way to freedom, my way to knowledge.

I feel terror sudden rip through my body when a heavy hand drops on my shoulder. I imagine the worst and in a flash my death goes through my mind, the Order doing a public execution as a lesson to everyone else. I feel like running until I hear his voice.

“You didn’t actually think I was going to let the woman I love go out into the world without me, did you?” says a very tired and out of breath voice.

I turn around and there he is, smile on his face, out of breath from running.I could tell that he was rushing to find shoes and food and ran as fast as he could to catch up with me.

“But what about…”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what to think now, and I don’t know what’s happening really. But I want to figure it out with you. I’m with you, forever. I made you a promise a long time ago and I have no intension of breaking it,” he says. He kisses me and hugs me and I know that all will be well as long as he is here with me.

I reach back into the ivy and tug at the door harder until it opens. We both look through and gasp at what we see. 

I didn’t even prepare for this.

Just Plain Old Fucking Lust

This couldn’t be real… it just felt too much like a dream. Reality checks: none. Dream checks: raining, gray and pink sky, the smell of you inside my car, YOU inside my car.

Really now. This can’t be real. It just can’t be. It seems too much like a dream. It’s just how all my dreams start out. The big blue gray clouds hovering in a pink orange sky, thick, clear raindrops slowly popping on top of my car, the street slick and blue as we drove down it. 

My tired head was running back and forth between your hand on my thigh going up my skirt and wondering if this was even happening, if this was just another dream.

I knew it was wrong, I knew it wasn’t you that I wanted really, but you were there and willing and I was weak and willing and wanting something more than just this empty longing for something not within my reach. Lust got the better of me. And you got my right in your hands.

Everyone is always told that sex should be special… but once you get to that age where everyone (except us few terminally single folks) has already been in a few long term relationships and have slept with a few people, it just becomes part of the norm in the dating world. Which means for me, a seemingly experienced, but really not so experienced college girl, it’s time to make choices. To either follow that life long lesson that sex is special and should be shared with someone important, or to go with nature and satisfy one another with a form of art and science. I chose to let whatever happen, happen. I chose that a long time ago. 

Since I made that decision, I’d been a little more “promiscuous,” because being raped while completely blown is slutty. It’s happened more than once, and I usually have no recollection of it. I’m usually “stupid” and wear slutty little clothes and let myself stray too far away from my guy friends or dates or girlfriends. Surprisingly, I was paid twice for my compensations because the guys- not even much older than me- thought I was escorting my dates.

I’ve done that whole born again virgin thing, but it didn’t ever really mean much since a. I’m not religious and b. I was raped with hardly any recollection. If I were to have conscious sex right now, I’d have no fucking clue what to do. I’m so awkward. I’m over the fact that I’ve been raped… or at least I’ve buried it so deep inside I’d deal with it later. It’s never bothered me, I was more flattered I suppose.

Anyways. Here I am, driving to a dark park isolated from other people to have my first sober sex with this guy I’ve known for a while and we’ve made an agreement to just do it, and worry about what happens later. This happens all the time for kids my age, right? I like to think it does. 

Parked.

Silence.

Sidewards glance.

Passion. 

God, I wish my car was bigger. 

For some reason, I feel like this whole heat of the moment thing just made it 10x better than it should have been for just a random hook up. Shit. 

Hands all over me, mouth all over me, heat overwhelming my entire being. 

The only thing that was unsatisfactory was that awkward silence after the big… you know. Just laying there on top of me for a few minutes, breathing, sweaty, naked, pulsing and thumping heartbeat against mine. And then getting dressed, oh GOD how awkward.

“So is this like a one time thing?” You ask again. Fuck me if I know… oh wait.

“I don’t know, I guess we’ll see if we ever need it again any time soon. Why does it need to be predetermined?” I say again.

When I got home, I wasn’t expecting to see your car, silver and wet like my new found glory, and I certainly wasn’t expecting you to fucking spill your god damned heart out to me.

You know that moment when your heart just stops because things are so perfect and so fucked up all at the same time? This is what was happening to me.

Thankfully you couldn’t tell I had just fucked your friend earlier that day, we were too caught up in the moment. 

What have I done to myself this time?

I just couldn’t wait like they all told me to. 

I just couldn’t wait a few fucking hours?

Stupid slutty, horny, hot, steamy, perfect…. fucked up bitch.

Life sucks, all it is, is just plain old fucking lust day in and day out. Life is all about sex, but we’re taught differently and to feel guilty about sex. Why?

Gravity.

Some people say that when going through a hard time, it’s best to surround ourselves with good people and positive energy. So I thought that would be the best choice right now, in my fragile state of mind. I was home alone for a few days, and I was starting to feel too lonely and too crazy again. So, naturally, I did what I thought I was supposed to do when feeling lonely and suicidal and invited all my friends over for a party. 

I could feel that buzz in my head and that itch in my stomach as I sat in the corner of the dark room as the movie played on my tv. Everyone was loud and so into one another, it made me feel even more lost, like they had come for all the wrong reasons. They didn’t even notice that I was underdressed, crying, and rocking in that corner. My friends just kept piling in my house, acknowledging one another and passing by me. 

When you walked in, I lost it. I couldn’t have these people here anymore- I thought that I wanted to be around people and friends but they were just making my insides cringe now. All I wanted was silence and solitude.

I don’t really know if anyone noticed me as I ran up the stairs and locked myself in my room with a bong and a bottle of vodka. I could still hear the records and the movie blaring through the walls, and the peoples voices kept crowding inside of my head. I couldn’t help but just sob, not knowing what else to do about my pain at the moment. I took a swig of vodka and packed a bowl and began smoking it by myself, but my persistent crying prevented me from taking a proper hit. It was just about pointless, seeing as I couldn’t breathe in between wails anyways.

I sat on the floor and opened up my closet, retrieving the many boxes I kept inside. I searched for the one that I kept things that reminded me of you in there, and found it at the very back, exactly where I had intended to keep my feelings. The box was well worn and taped at one of the corners that fell apart. I dumped it on the floor in front of me and drank some more vodka, not caring about the vile taste or the ill fate it would soon have on my body. I rummaged through the notes I had intended to give you, the tickets to the concerts we went together, the few pictures of us, your ring…

A few hours had passed already and I was beginning to calm down, almost ready to try and fall asleep, the buzz of drugs and alcohol no longer an unfamiliar sensation coursing through my bones.

At this point, I was trying to figure out what was happening around me.

Where was I?

Weren’t there other people here?

How long have I been alone?

Have people even noticed I was gone?

Is this happening…?

I could feel another panic attack rising in my throat, clumping inside of my chest. I let it out. Cried. Screamed again. Whatever it took. It didn’t last long, though. I tossed the alcohol into my closet and found a can of soda on my desk and washed out the bitter emotions from my mouth. I was calm. I was okay. I wiped the tears from my face and felt at peace, knowing that I got all that negative energy out of my system. Still though, I sat on the ground and opened that gold box I was avoiding. 

I had just barely opened the lid when my door opened. It was you. I stood up and kicked the box and things behind me, hoping they would end up under my desk. 

“What’s going on…?” you asked me, looking at the mess I had made in my room.

“Nothing, nothing, just go. I want everybody to get out,” I said. I started to lean over to pick up the things from the box with shaking hands. 

“Hey, stop that. What’s wrong?” you tried to reach for my hands but I pulled away, packing things back up into my closet.

“Nothing. I said nothing.”

you grabbed my waist and pulled me to look at you. I couldn’t. I tried to pull away from you. I put my hands on your chest and shoved. But you were stronger and more willing, and you pulled my hips to meet yours and held my small body down with your big hands. My hands were still resting on your chest, squeezed in between our bodies. I still couldn’t look at your face, and so I just looked turned my head completely to the left, it resting on your shoulder. My hands started to move up slowly towards your neck. Your mouth met my cheek and I craned my neck so your lips were pressed against my ear.

All the fuzziness and loss of control that were existing in my crossfaded eyes suddenly disappeared, and I never felt more sober in my life at this moment.

“You can’t do this anymore,” you whispered against my face.

I pulled back enough to turn my head to yours. My arms had moved to hold your shoulders, and there was no space between us, except for that inch between our faces, filled with the gravity that would lead to the inevitability of this situation.

Time seemed to stop then, and a million years flashed between our eyes. All of the doubts and mixed feelings that we had encountered over the years seemed to multiply all at once and splayed out to the future years for me to see. Then they all rushed and gathered together and spat back into my head and I was back in that moment with you again. 

I couldn’t fight you any longer.

Gravity took over, and my mouth finally met yours. 

All these years of tension were cut loose, once and for all, and I couldn’t seem to get you all inside of my soul at once. I just needed you more and more and there was no chance of me disconnecting my flesh from yours.

That false sense of happiness I felt with anyone else seemed childish and grotesque compared to this. 

After what seemed like an eternity of sucking in each others souls, time started ticking again. There was no tension, no sadness, no waiting for something around the corner. Not anymore. This was it.

“I don’t want them here anymore,” I whispered.

“They’re not. It’s just me. It’s just you and me now.”

After all that time of trying to fight something that seemed out of sorts and against what the universe wanted, the air was at peace and still. If the world was about to end today, as it so seemed it would, we could have stopped it, and we did. 

There was nothing more to think or say or hear except for the wind moaning lightly through the house saying “finally.”