50. “Shift"Once I believed that love was most important. Once I thought that happiness was something to be taken for granted. However, I soon found out that both of these things were untrue, that there were things that mattered more, that forever striving to be 'happy' and 'loved' would only lead to much more pain than I thought I really could handle.
Orgy split up. It was inevitable. I don’t know how we’d kept it together that long. Maybe we thought there was a point to it, but the fans weren’t enough of a reason to stay with people we hated. The threesome went off and did their own thing. I watched with some amusement as their solo project crashed and burned and they slowly sank into oblivion. Ryan would call up sometimes and try to talk, but there was little to say. Maybe once there had been a friendship, now it was only obligation and I didn’t give a shit whether or not he deigned to talk to me. I knew that they blamed me for their failure. It would have been pointless to pretend otherwise.
Jay and I just wandered, going wherever the bus routes would take us. We wound up in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t even know what state we were in, but they still took credit cards, so we found a motel and let the world pass by.
It snowed the third day we were there. Jay poked me awake in the early morning and forced me to get out of bed and walk over to the window to look at it. There was a sort of hidden euphoria in the way that it just covered up every imperfection and made what had been a streaming mecca of wasted high school students and vacationing families who had taken a wrong turn into the sort of white perfection that was snow. And right now, just before the sun had fully risen and everything had a blue sheen, it was perfect. Eventually it would turn to slush and curses as the cars churned up hidden dirt and ruined everything. I scratched at my arm and wished that I could just cover it all up with cold. Nothing could ruin it again. I could have stared out at it forever.But I was cold and went back to bed soon after the grand revelation, Jay sliding in beside me. We laid like that for a while, huddled up and covered with all of the sheets and the comforter. I still felt so cold, as if in seeing such beauty I had left a bit of myself.
He smiled happily, it wasn’t as rare anymore. Perhaps because we were pretty much always alone and the world didn’t seem like it was bearing down on us. We’d left almost everything back at that apartment and the house he used to share with Paige. That wasn’t to say that things were perfect. I still had scissors. Small ones. Almost incapable of doing any real harm, let alone cutting skin. They were a security blanket that I had yet to get rid of. He knew I had them, but never said anything, respecting my flimsy desire to feel like I had some control over an addiction.
I’m sure he had a knife shoved in his bag somewhere, but he wasn’t in a huge hurry to add to the marks on his body.
Images filled my mind in bits of shattered reality, figures above me, clothed all in surgical scrubs, grinning teeth jutting out of malformed mouths. Everything was swimming in a fog of green...where the hell was I? The smell of blood was thick in the air, screams encapsulated everything, it was a hell of blood and metal. I was strapped down to a table staring up at them, unable to move or make any facial expressions. Chrome covered everything, even the figures’ teeth were that silvery color, I knew this was a dream, it had to be a dream. Blood was spilling out over my arms, oh fuck, was I just remembering when I had tried to kill myself?My stomach was on fire, flames of death and destruction tore at my intestines, and the flames only spread to my arms...but my arms were so cold, they had long ago given up all pretense of holding in the veins and blood pulsing through them. A flood of blood spilled over me and onto the floor, coating everything in crimson. Yet the world above me was still chrome, no trace of rust and age. Why couldn’t I scream? Why hadn’t I passed out?
Then they pulled out a huge needle and plunged the tip into my arm, now I could scream, now I could try to pull away, now I felt like my whole existence was in order to feel this pain. Why had I done this to myself? I hadn’t felt faint when the blood was squirting out in torrents of scarlet, but now I was just barely hanging on, screaming my head off, why were they taking the blood away instead of giving it back?!
All the while their grinning mouths and horrid faces, and I swear that one of them was Ryan and everything was bloody and the scissors were coming out of the walls and I just wanted to DIE...why wouldn’t they let me DIE!!!
“Everything’s going to be okay. You’re going to be fine. It was a nasty accident you had there.” She smiled, her whole mouth was chrome and it spilled out and over her entire face, rendering any and all illusions that she was human false. The other doctors had lost every pretension of being human and were busy scrabbling all over my body with hooks and points and IVs and needles.
My fingers scrabbled at the edge of the bed, what the fuck were they saying, I wasn’t going to be okay, I couldn’t be okay. Jay...where was Jay?!!
That was when I saw him, his wrist burst open and throbbing, his mouth forming my name as he stabbed hard a thousand times into his stomach, my name flowing out in dark black clotted blood. My fault, it was all my fault.
Then light, and sweat. Frantic panting, I needed to find out if I really was bleeding all over. My body was still scarred, but it wasn’t leaking anywhere. Even that didn’t get a sigh of relief. Jay wasn’t in the bed. Sometimes he wasn’t and I’d grown to trust that he wasn’t going to run off again, but today, it was a poor choice. I threw all the sheets and everything on the floor in a vain attempt to find out where he was. Maybe if I kept moving I could keep out the voice inside my head, the steady incessant drone of “CUT CUT CUT CUT.” I hadn’t given in to it in so long, I wasn’t going to now. But I could just see the scissors glittering inside the bag laying sprawled open on the floor. Where was Jay?He was sitting outside on the curb watching the snow fall. When I grabbed him and held him like I thought he was going to disappear into the grey sky, he looked at me in shock and thankfully held me tighter instead of pushing me away. “What’s wrong?” he whispered, wincing as my grip stiffened on his chest.
“I want to cut.” It came out before I realized it.
“Did you?” I got the sense that if I had said that I had, he would have forgiven me instantly for it.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It would have been stupid.” I said softly.
“That’s why you came out here?”
“I had a dream... I was bleeding to death, all of the scars were open and they were looking down at me and...you were in the corner saying my name and cutting your stomach open.” I pulled away, ashamed that I’d just come out here instead of dealing with it myself. I could have been mature about this. He stared at the snow and emerging slush in the parking lot. It really hadn’t snowed all that much, but it was enough to make a mess and cover the worst of the blemishes.
“Let’s go get breakfast.” he said after a long pause.
Getting breakfast didn’t mean eating it. Jay kept on squishing down his scrambled eggs until juice dribbled out and lighting up cigarettes nervously only to put them out a few seconds later. I don’t know why I kept on getting pancakes. It wasn’t like I ever ate them. They sat there and accused me of being insensitive to the needs of dough and syrup. These actually looked like the cheery place-mat picture. Immaculate and perfect circles. Perhaps I just didn’t want to ruin them.“If I hadn’t been there this morning...would you have cut?” he asked after the waitress had left the bill, shaking her head and whispering something about what a waste it was serving food to people who didn’t eat it. I frowned at her as she left, then turned my attention back to Jay. He wouldn’t meet my eyes and just fidgeted with the silverware.
“Yeah.” The truth was always better than just lying. He would have been able to see through it anyway if I had.
The fidgeting turned a little worse and his nails raked down his knuckles to his wrist. “Talking to me helps?”
I nodded, unable to speak. He should have know it. His finger was tracing the line on his wrist. I pushed it away, gently. When he was nervous he tended to dwell on it, as if it could just pop open again.
A few seconds later he tapped out another cigarette and lit it, hands shaking. “But...I’m not stable.” He took a drag and then acted like he was going to put it out before he reconsidered.
“I know. I don’t expect you to be.” Brown eyes met mine for a moment then flicked away. “I wouldn’t ask that of you.”
“It just makes me feel so helpless when you tell me that you want to cut. I mean, I know what that’s like, but I don’t fully understand it. And...I want to help, but I can’t.” Smoke cascaded from his lips and he watched it trail up to the ceiling sadly.
“I’m going to be fine.” I said, touching his hand reassuringly.
He nodded as if perhaps he didn’t believe it but was willing to try for my sake.
We left town the next day, heading out in the bus to go further north, further east, just away. This time we were going to pick somewhere and stay there and let there be no chance for anyone to find us. Snow and rock and forest whizzed by. I kept my face almost pressed against the windows. Green melded into grey and then it was all a whir. Jay slept on my shoulder and I let him, glaring at anyone who felt that staring was an appropriate reaction to anything out of the ordinary.The bus would stop at these isolated locations and sit there, waiting for non-existent passengers to materialize from underneath the spider web ridden eaves and from inside the dilapidated buildings. The driver forced us all out sometimes and Jay and I would try and avoid attracting any attention by hiding in the corners and hiding our faces with magazines. There was no one here like us and maybe that was the way it had to be.
There was only so far that tickets would take us, and eventually we wound up in one of those towns that was little more than a bus stop and one street of shops. Since I looked more normal at the moment, I found myself volunteered to go inside the post office and see if anyone had put up a house or something for sale. Jay leaned against the wall of the building and tried to act like everything was okay.
There was an apartment for rent, it didn’t sound that luxurious, but it was something.
It didn’t take that long to convince the landlord to rent it to us, I gathered that no one had expressed an interest in moving into town in a really long time, in fact, most people wanted out. He didn’t seem at all phased by our appearance. Maybe the money in his hand was enough to allay any fears he had.
It wasn’t the nicest place in the world, but it was a bubble. A bubble that wasn’t going to pop unexpectedly and destroy us with betrayals of trust. Luckily it was furnished, even if most of the stuff looked to have been made out of orange crates. I knew how to scrounge and it seemed that now it was going to be up to me to make sure that we got all the things that we needed. He was unsure at first what the hell we were going to do, but after a while he got into making treks to the thrift store and finding things that weren’t so awful to make the apartment more like a home. TV was an ever present outlet and it was so easy to just lose track of four hours just flipping channels and living other peoples’ lives.The scissors went into a drawer in the kitchenette. They didn’t see the light of the flickering overhead fluorescent light often. The last time I’d gotten them out to cut something they had been corroded with rust.
I called Gavin and let him know where I was. He didn’t seem to be overly concerned. I assured him that I’d still visit sometimes and that I’d always be there if he needed me.
For the most part everyone else left us alone. There were token attempts to at least remember our names, but we were so far removed from their concerns that they took to just ignoring us. I got used to ringing myself up when the clerk at the grocery store started talking to some of the farmers about cattle or something. Occasionally there was something I could join in on, but I didn’t expect it.
The scabs healed and the scars started to go away completely. I knew that once they were gone maybe we could think about rejoining the world again, maybe answering Ryan’s letters or his phone-calls instead of letting them accumulate in the wastebasket. Jay still picked at his scar when he was nervous, and I still got urges... Everything wasn’t perfect, but we could at least act like it was.
And maybe that’s all I wanted.
END
Author's notes: This was originally supposed to end at part 20, but there was an outcry for more. I will not be adding on to this story at any point in the near future.
At this point, it is around 132 pages.
Thank you to those who have kept me working on this. Thank you for those who have commented and thank you for reading.
If you have any comments, please e-mail them to me at [email protected]
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