one million bullets } frances&elvaina

I brush fingers through my hair and grab an over sized shirt with paint stroke stains and the morning sun pales against my leg, I cough. Sometimes I remind myself of my own destruction. A systematic thing, the way smoke eats at my lungs and the bags under my eyes from staying up screaming over ocean waves - shit. I'm such a cunt, I can't help but smile and laugh at it sometimes. 

One queen can't win a chess match alone, and in a world of natural selection I lost the only pawn I had; maybe I'd rather just accept how the world's fucked me rather then try to win all by myself. ("I-") A pip squeak through the door - "I'm sorry."

Lmao, shit. 

"Wait, wait," fingers articulate, a painter's talent really, swinging the door open and propping myself against the doorway. Somewhere I feel a little bad, probably in an empty stomach yeah, but I don't like quitting. Of the few things I've been good at, I've been smoking, painting and destroying myself since back when Jasmine was a hair braid away and part of me is tired of being alone. "I had to get dressed," I cough, no pants on and paint in unbrushed hair. 

"What'd you want again?"

There's a yawn somewhere in my throat, like a lion's roar under a pound of pressure. I've never really known what home feels like, what smell makes you feel whole again but the closest I've ever been able to assume is the smell of fresh paint, the smell of infant mornings and the smell of clean hair in forest's wake, but there's always been something missing. 

I yawn. 

And Elvaina collapses on me, choking as her arms wrap around my waist and my arms awkward in the air around us, one still gripping to the doorway with drying paint cracking in the braille of my finger tips. Sudden, her skin wrapping around the loose shirt covering mine and it makes me panic for a second - the only contact I've had recently is my fists in tree bark. And I stutter, a "you okay?" as I put my hand awkward on her back with blush in my cheeks. 

She smells like the ocean to me. And I pat her back before stomaching the feeling of captivity; Frances motherfuckin' Eckhart the only other steel bars I've known. "If you wanted in you could've just, uhh," it's so awkward being a cunt sometimes, "asked. Or something." And I prop her back upright and trail back to the paint cans, bare feet and thighs stinging against the cold of the paneled floor. 

"You can come in," I don't make eye contact, my voice more to the wall as I dip my fingers in still-wet reds, "I guess."

Red paint is cool to the touch, clinging to me like I'm it's mother and it's scared to not be able to hold onto me. The mother of red, nah, I start with a point. A sharp curve that extends narrowly in one stroke like her's as Elvaina sweeps into the room, and she sniffles a little and I have goosebumps. 

She reminds me of somebody, I think. 

And she rubs her eyes in the morning silence and I make quick looks for references as I draw eyebrows stemming from slightly the bridge of her nose - she's not okay. She's not like me, she has stronger cheekbones and longer eyebrows even though she's smaller than me, and she's on break point ("I'm sorry I'm sorry I just-") as I draw pale cheeks. 

"It's like I can't breathe."

"Oh, shit I," boy, that's awkward. I stare at her for a second with doe-eyes before I realize that's not helping any, my red cheeks and her pale ones, but I can't donate blood flow. We hold eye contact for a second before I look back at the wall, adding frail lips in red, not a frown but not a smile. Just existent. 

Just. My wrists feel less articulate, even through smooth singular strokes, "that sucks." I never knew Jequirity or Amerika much, but the feeling of being alone never really left me. Maybe I'm just bitter, as I draw closed eyes and wispy eyelashes. "I don't really know how to help," and I chuckle a little to the walls. 

When do I ever. 

It's quiet - that's the thing I hate most about people. 

The silence that comes with being no quiet alone. I'm a knuckle-bruiser, I can't stand the silence, I punch trees and scream at the ocean and kick shins, this isn't my environment. I want to scream, but I can't and I know that. There's a valley between her sentences in to fall into and it's hard enough to keep myself afloat as I draw a chin and a neck and shoulders bleeding into the mix-matched walls. 

In a split second I remembered why I didn't talk to Jeq and Amerika when they left, why I didn't go home right after the reaping. This isn't my home. 

And I had nothing to say. 

"Just don't let me fall again,"

"Then sit down, duh." I smile to the wall, "I have a bed for a reason." I dip my fingers into black, tar thick on my hands as I draw dots around the portrait on the wall, stars and cosmo and a region of planets floating around her - the mother of red. Not me, not Jasmine or anybody else I know until now I don't think.

A quick reference, I look back at Elvaina's sculpture and back at the wall, and "I fucked up the lips." And I grab a handful of black, the tar filling out of my hands like sin and I stick it ontop of the portrait, drowning it out just like the rest of my mistakes and I slide on the floor a foot over to start again. 

Tar sticks between my fingers well, like glue retracting me to the wall and I don't really feel anything. It was just a sketch, a systematic mistake and it's probably not the last, and I know well enough what it's like to be the only mistake to stay afloat. It's like a service from me to it, if anything. "It was pretty before," yeah, well shit happens. Jasmine leaves you and Jequirity dies and sometimes your mascara runs, Elvaina, and I can't help you everytime.

"You didn't have to destroy it." 

And I take a second, playing with the black in my hand, shiny from the window's light. A void in my palm - nice. "I didn't destroy it," mistakes aren't that easy to get rid of you see. I wipe the excess void into smooth strokes on the wall as well, a canvas for another day if anything.

"It's still there under the void, somewhere, just not visible right now." Just like in my beating heart is Jasmine, alive and in my arms with hair a-frenzy in a field of wildflowers. I miss her, and "that's all, really Jasss-ellvania." My left eye twitches. That's awkward. 

I sigh, the name sour on my tongue - Jasmine and Frances motherfuckin' Eckhart. A docile volcano, the pores of my hands feel clogged and me captive. My fingers drag through a neutral pink - I'm bored. I want to be bored, empty. Like a new canvas, for my own hand to paint at free will, a neutral emotion. 

("Jasss-") shit. 

My lungs are filled with dust, harder to breathe through a face of stone, saying her name hurts more than just fucking stabbing myself - god. "Not visible right now - not visible ever," if only. In the black of my heart, Jasmine calls my name and I call back and she can't hear me, but I know between the fragments that I'm not alone in this world because she's here under my very own void; "voids do not go away, Frances."

"Dear god, I hope not."

Pink on my fingertips, I draw a dick on the walls, something to laugh at before I grab more pink to blend it into the walls, "voids are kinda necessary, to cover up what we can't handle." Excess pink being stroked onto the walls and onto my shirt, and I look back at Elvaina. 

"Sometimes it's just better to forget."