Memoria Speculo

Poison

As soon as she entered the room, I knew she was poison. She had a look in her eyes like she was ready to wreck anything and anyone in her way if the situation called for it. Her head was held high, prideful and confident, wholly aware of everything she was and not ashamed in the least. At that point, when her eyes locked on mine and she smirked, I knew I was better off turning away and ignoring her for the rest of the year.

But that didn't stop her toxic lips from locking onto mine in the bathroom half an hour later, did it?

Really, I like to think that I'm smarter than that. That even though I knew she could see me from across the room and immediately know what she wanted, that I would be able to turn away. But no. Immediately, she walked right over me, and I let her. I let her because damn, the way her hand found its way onto my waist, nails digging lightly into my skin as she pushed me harder into the wall. I liked to think that I was using her in the same way as she was using me, that all our relationship was based on was the both us blowing off steam, ramping up the physical interactions to drown out the fact that we were both lonely. So lonely it felt like our chests were imploding, so lonely that we needed the physical drive to keep ourselves going.

We never talked, she and I. The only communication was the sudden grab of an arm, being pulled into a deserted hallway or classroom, desperate for a fix of affection. Maybe that's why I was so surprised when she texted me in the middle of the autumn break. She didn't say a lot, admittedly, just enough to cook up a lie and leave immediately.

Need a fix. Come over?

The text was followed by her address and no more than five minutes later, I was standing outside a house on a street that I on any other day would have sworn was abandoned. There had been a gas leak in all of the houses a few months later, and all of the residents had been moved while the state inspected it. But there, at the end of the cul-de-sac, she sat perched on a roof, her back against a window. She looked more run-down than I had ever seen her before, more broken and torn down than I thought was even possible. There was a ladder leaning against the roof, and I wasted no time reaching her. 

We were both desperate, but this was something new, something wandering the thin line between devastation and depravity. It wasn't until we were both dressed again, me laying on the floor and her on the bed, that I found out it wasn't her house. 

There was a silence in the air, hanging there like it was waiting for me to ask the question that had been twisting and turning in the back of my mind for weeks. 

"How many others like me do you have?" I asked, eyes locked on her.

She laughed and lit a cigarette. "None. Just you." 

The answer left me stumped, wondering. "Why?" I asked after a moment of thought. "You could have anyone."

"So could you," she remarked. "And I'm not going to try and claim there wasn't a reason, it just might not be the reason you want to hear."

"Try me."

She laughed, brightly, but was interrupted halfway through by a horrifying series of coughs.

"I chose you," she croaked. "Because I couldn't ruin you. Because you were, are, already a burning trainwreck, so there was no way I could make it worse, now was there?"

I would be insulted if she wasn't right. If that hadn't been the reason I let this happen too. Because we both knew we were too shit for anyone else. No, there was no point in being insulted. Instead, I laughed too. She joined me, breaking into a hysteric fit of giggles to try and hide the reality we had both uncovered. We stayed there, laughing, for what seemed like hours, two broken messes trying to keep themselves together with each other as lifelines.

That night was the last time I ever saw her. She was gone the next morning, never to be heard from again. I still don't know if she's alive or dead, if she made it out like I did or if the ropes that had been burning at the edges finally snapped. I don't know, and I never will, but that's not the part that I mourn the most. No, what I truly mourn is the realization that never got to happen, the unsheathed faith that never got to be uttered or believed before it was shot down and buried.

Not even to this day do I know if I loved her.