infect me [no! brutalize me] ((lalalalia))

Wake up lonely with you by my side
One more night, it doesn't feel right
There are movies playing in your eyes
You dream of our fortunes

It's hard calling Marina's journey, a walk. More so, it's a hopeless meander down the lane of lost innocence and helplessness. Or an ambling shuffle towards her untimely demise: Mars never did stir up enough of anything to count as a person who should be allowed to walk this earth. She never fought her master, she never loved with passion the boy who saved her, and she cannot even walk well. She stumbles, catches her breath for a second so she can steady the spots of color running through her mind, where exhaustion and ache rip holes in sanity and logic, so that she is doubting that the path she sees before her eyes is "the way to go."

What if little red riding hood had sensed a troubling presence on the path to grandmothers? Would she steal into the darkness of the forests embrace, and risk the unknown, if it means saving herself from trouble? Brave people would. Brave people always take the hard way out, even if they don't mean to. But weaklings never stray far from the path their eyes fix upon because they can't handle the sensation of blindness that accompanies the adventures of the unknown lands. Marina is neither. She can't call herself a hero, but she suspects that she may be able to save herself from the dark thoughts down the road she's chosen. My mistake.

But it isn't a conscious effort to preserve herself. Mars is a strange creature who lives on precautionary tales and could-be's. She never has a clue as to why she's done something, until her efforts are all used up, and she is staring straight into the face of a result. Usually a bad one, a rotten fate for the girl who was sold into slavery by a malevolent corn machine that ripped out a few years of happiness, straight from the fabric of her life.

Instead, Marina regards her pilgrimage from clear, chosen path into the icy grips of a slow death by pressures of life and self-inflicted anxiety, as a short rest.

She toys at the idea of saving herself through the action of turning around and walking down the familiar path (just in the wrong direction, towards her house of angry sisters and coffee drinkers) but chooses instead to wander towards the lake sitting to her counter-clockwise left side (if one judges the vague left, right, front, and back directions by an internal image of a watch face, which one really shouldn't, but this one had always found as an agreeable and logical alternative to the popular internal compass some possessed) This is where the numbers 6 to 12 sit, this is where a strange boy lies back-to-ground, eyes-to-sky.

More importantly, this is not near the carrier pigeon with beady eyes, staring her down from a few feet up the path like an unhappy bridge troll minus the bridge, multiplying the ugly, ferociousness of the troll. (This pigeon doesn't even stop to chew at the few pieces of bread and what appears to be cheese that Marina had tossed out of her pants pocket in order to satiate the fierce and mighty creature of the skies. He just stares greedily at her like his bird brain is translating her fingers into overgrown, sausage-sized worms dangling in flying distance of his beak from the innocence stubs of a flesh colored worm-container.)

She blinks at the bird, crumples up her hands into tightly wound fists, and shoves them into two front pockets of her pants, glad to have gotten rid of her left over morsels before doing so (cheese in the summertime has never appealed to touch. Or smell for that matter.)

Keeping thoughts away from the aforesaid smell of melted cheese on sparse breadcrumbs, or the sweat pooling in her skin's creases (especially the dip of her lower back; untouched by a gentle, flowing tunic that had seemed a downright logical choice for a summer day but now left Marina suffering from cruel knowledge. Yes, she is that girl with the creased, angry forehead and painfully tight lips that result from an uncomfortable situation where the pocket bread crumbs could have literally swam in all the sweat filming over her dewy, mostly tanned skin) Keeping her thoughts focused for once, Marina intends to walk over to the person lying on his back. Not because she finds him the least bit attractive, or alluring, but because she would feel down-right awkward if her lips didn't form some sort of greeting to announce her presence and perhaps save her from the undying embarrassment of also being that girl who is clearly ignoring the only other person in the room. Err, at the park.

She cringes at the idea of it, Marina is not the social one of her circle (of roommates and their friends who she does not personally know, but who she has heard enough of their conversations through her house's thin walls, that she feels as though they are old, distanced friends by now) but she has never been one to endure the silent pauses of a dying conversation, or the awful prickle of knowing their are judging, harassing, angry eyes on the back of your neck. Eyes that can burn your skin so deeply, it overheats and needs pools of sweat to quench the thirsty flames and stop the heat from raging on and on.

Pain sakingly conscious of herself, of her body and her crackling voice, Marina positions herself so that she is opposite the sun, and her features are partially shadowed, or so she hopes, from the watchful gaze of a boy who spends his time fighting zombies across the sky. She tries to will her eyes from snapping into their purely instinctive habit of gazing clinically over her company to the point that for all her words, her blue eyes can ruin a social situation between blinks of an eye. She literally positions her eyes so that they are firmly focused on the suspicious third-party pigeon that seems either attached to her sausage fingers, or her fellow young adult.

He's handsome. The thought catches her by surprise. One does not sort boys into categories of "rateability." Marina does not do so, at least. She can't say whether or not the guys at school used to be either cute, hot, fit, handsome, or.. "sexy," she won't speak for her roommates boyfriends or the guys at work. The curious by-stander to the zombie-fright-flight-fight can only ever say she can't get her masters face out of her mind, or the boy who saved her from the life she unhappily entered as a small, obedient child of the one, the only universal authority of the world.

She remembers features so very well, I like the way his hair tickles his face, like the grass reaching up to my sandal-clad feet, and brushing at my skin, but she won't let herself give an opinion on someone through her observations. Least of all based on their outsides. She is the scientist of many hypothesis, some even to be thrown into the reject pile because of their preposterousness, and she never speaks her mind about what is real and what is not, although she has made up a strongly worded argument as to how one could theoretically (and this is the step between hypothesis and fact) argue what is real and what is "all in your head."

She wishes, I wish I, hadn't noticed the pleasantness of the boy under the daylight sky, in the heat; the boy who probably has sweat running down his back too, if his shirt isn't pressed between the curious strands of grass and the skin so that it dampens with the moisture and keeps the discomfort at bay until he stands on creaky, tired legs and lazily shuffles back down the path. But at the same time, this foot note has led to the thought that he is just like her, down to the pools of sweat and sadness gathering around his face and body. He seems sad, - no disappointed would be the right word to think privately - that Marina is not who she should be, or has been in his head.

She secretly sympathizes with his own personal plight, will he speak with her politely, and let small talk bring more similarities between the two of them to light, or will he carry on unnoticing her, except for his strangely colored, awfully piercing eyes which are not only heating her skin, but boring holes through her and making her open her mouth to ask him to stop before her etiquette kicks in and tells her it will be impolite if she does so?

Dread kicks in before either possible outcome breaks out of the shaded cave of her mouth and into the daylight between them. Marina reaches for words, draws her body in tightly and holds herself higher, on air, for a second, but abruptly drops when the moment of social clarity fades back into the black. Her eyes search his face, then ignore it in favor of the growing grass she's accustomed to fixing her eyes on while she walks. But then they draw closer to him again, and back to the bold pigeon.

"Is he, your friend?" Marina says, with a pause between the word couplings, to allow her mouth to test the air before she finishes her sentence. She had started off with a crackling, new flame of a whisper. Just ignited, flickering shyly under the day-glow fixed stare of the boy and the bird and the world on her shoulders. But she catches, just like any other flame trained to suck up oxygen on command and try to live for as long as possible. Her next words are slightly smoother.

"I think he may have taken a, liking to me," are the next, awkwardly placed words that go off almost without a hitch, but are otherwise mundane and inconsequential to an introduction. Their only saving grace is the shy, tugging smile Marina permits to flourish under the green-eyed stare. She is however uncomfortable from the settling awkwardness of two teens (or one, so far) greeting and meeting a new acquaintance (or two, from Marina's point of view. She's already made an effort to include the pigeon, so it counts now) is pulling her back into old fears that she is a freak, even though the voices in her head are reassuring her once again, for the ten billionth time, that she is not as much a freak as she has led herself to believe, at least she is able to disguise the freak in her, for a little while.

I wasn't taught this way
With a thousand things to say
I was born with a broken heart
I don't belong