the bones you gave me :: {lalia!}

i've got a tattered line of string
and I tie it around everything
that I want to call my own
but it never seems to hold
everything never seems to hold

Dear Friend,

It wasn't because of rebellion, I swear. I'm not so stupid as to fight against myself, even though there are days when I want to and I won't lie... this was one of them. Andorra usually comes to visit on transfusion days, skipping and smiling because she doesn't know better. Doesn't know that hospital stays are not happy for me, even though she likes them because she feels so close to me when the doctors push her blood into my veins. Doesn't know that the way she is forever saving me over and over again is secretly awful for me (no sisters should be this close). Doesn't know she is accidentally mocking me with every light-footed jump step of momentum that tugs her body into the air, because that is nothing to her and sometimes I am so jealous I can't stand it. So I begged Niko to keep her home, to distract and playact like he's a good brother for the afternoon. Just for today, please.

It's terrible, but some days I need my little sister's blood more than I need her.

Maybe there was guilt rotting in my stomach as I lay in my hospital room, staring at the semi-permanent IV in my arm and thinking about how the wire attached to it is threaded up my vein all the way to the edge of my heart. Each minute that passed as I waited for the nurse to return with a bottle of Andorra's blood from cold storage — another fragment of her life taken for me — was just more time for me to dwell. Honestly, I never feel like I'm worth it. All this sacrifice. So much money. Hours and days and years of medical devotion. The longer you spend in the hospital, the harder it gets to remember reasons for wanting to get better. Death starts to sound so easy when you're tucked into a bed with sheets so heavily disinfected that you can only think about how they are the dirtiest kind of clean. Blood and piss and vomit and —

Really, it wasn't rebellion. I suddenly just needed to find a reason to live, because I couldn't remember. Not with that smell filling me up and everything around me so emptyblanknothing white. I left my room because I was searching, not running. It turned into an adventure by accident.

The freedom of choice became what I was looking for. My bare feet padding silently down the corridors, hospital gown fluttering around my knees with each corner I turned, all of these little things reminding me how to smile. With each doctor and medical aide I snuck past, I began to feel an itch in my lungs that promised laughter. Danger and death were pushed from my thoughts and that's why I started to skip down that hallway and into that room.

His room.

Maybe I did hear the nurses, a little bit frantic in their search for me, as I skidded through the door, terrifyingly off balance from my own giddiness. My arms windmilling as I attempted to bring myself to a stop before my fragile body crashed into a wall or a nightstand, I fought the empty air with a wide-eyed giggle, my heart racing because everything was so forbidden. Running away from my room was one thing, running was quite another. I'd forgotten how it felt. Feet slapping cold tile, lungs heaving, and everything zooming past as if I were time traveling into the future because that blur was so completely unfamiliar.

I did catch myself before I ran into the wall, in case you were wondering. Otherwise I don't suppose I'd be in a fit enough state to be writing, my hands so swollen and purple with bruises that I wouldn't be able to hold a pencil. Instead I swayed back-and-forth in the emptiness until I heard my name echo distant through the hallway from the mouths of nurses: "Charlotte!" But my heart was skipping beats and each time it jump-stepped within my chest I felt a little less jealous of my sister and like I was maybe not so awful of a person as I had been earlier on... and I didn't want to go back. I wanted to stay like that.

So with my newfound quick-quick danger steps, I shut the door of the room I had invaded and turned to its occupant with a sly smile and a finger pressed to my lips. Shhhh, the upturned corners of my mouth bargained with him as my name echoed outside once more, I'll give you a secret to keep if you'll give me just a moment of your silence in return.

Love always,
Charlie

y o u r h e a r t
won't heal right
if you keep
t e a r i n g
out the sutures

Dear Friend,

Breathing is harder than it should be after spending three weeks bedridden, only getting up to walk the ten steps to the bathroom and the ten back. Then it's time to be tucked back in, because my parents (my brother, the nurses and doctors, my neighbors, all the people who do and don't know me but who are nervous in my fragile presence regardless) don't like it when I stand or walk. Dangerous. Risky. Unnecessary. My mother hates when I reply to her chiding with ideas about how I like doing unnecessary things — hugging, smiling, laughing until my lungs hurt — because isn't that the point of being alive? I want to be more than a hollow heartbeat and a mechanical breath.

I don't like how everyone else would be content to have me bubble-wrapped and placed on a display shelf for the rest of my life. Safe. Miserable.

Even so, I know that what I did was too much. As my lungs heaved from exertion, I knew that the bottoms of my feet must be splattered with new bruises and my legs pricked all over with constellations of tiny purple spots — pinpoint evidence of how I'm bleeding through my own skin. These marks are a very different kind of rebellion than the impulse that caused me to run away from my own hospital room: my body against itself. It's like a kind of suicide, because technically I'm killing myself. Or maybe I'm murdering myself, since the choice to die is in my blood, not my conscious thoughts. Either way, there is no one else for me to pass the blame on and being my own downfall is the cruelest of fates.

The fate I made for myself that day was far more kind. Even as he asked "Who are you?" and "What are you doing here?" there was no malice in his voice. I was not the unwelcome intruder in his life that I so often am in my own. His voice was swelled with curiosity; his voice was an adventure. For the first time I could remember, someone had expectations for me to do something other than stay still, stay safe. Standing there, I realized I could be dangerous without dying and I could find something without running away.

Since I wasn't hiding from him, I told him the truth. "I'm Charlie. I'm on an adventure." I think I've been looking for you, even though I didn't know it until now. With a grin, I walked over and hopped up on the foot of his bed. Each step on the way there automatically reverted back to that ever-so-careful pace I've had drilled into me over the years, all tiptoes and overly-careful balance, sort of like when you're a kid pretending that a line of black tiles across an all white floor is a rope bridge over a lava pit. Only real. "Who are you?" There was a pause and a head tilt before a teasing grin bloomed across my face. "What are you doing here?" And I wasn't looking at the needle marks in his arms as I said it or asking about what was inside him that he was trying to stay safe from. No. What I was really asking was: Do you want to come along?

Love always,
Charlie

we'll cut our bodies free
from the tethers of this scene
start a brand new colony
where everything will change
we'll give ourselves new names

Dear Friend,

It wasn't until he held out his hand and said "Caspierre, but, uh, you can call me Casp," that I remembered who I was. In my head I had been in some Otherworld, as if once upon a time were suddenly just another line in my own life, but then his hand was there and I was moving my own toward it... and the proximity cracked all my grand illusions.

The dying have the strangest habits. Things to remind us that we aren't ghosts yet, but also things that remind us that we have still crossed a line that separates us from the truly living. Me? I have been trained not to touch people. Inches are miles to me and I know how to be so close and still maintain a perpetual separation, moving in coordinated time so I'm stepping back as they move forward and leaning in as they shift away. It's like dancing. Or at least it's how I imagine dancing, since that is yet one more life experience I have been deprived of: senseless minutes just flailing along with a drum beat, limbs beating up the air in time with a rhythm until all the blood in your body has been shaken up and you're light headed and dizzy with the innocent danger of your own existence and —

When I froze, there was a space remaining between our palms that might have been best measured with molecules, not millimeters. My mother's voice was in my ears, screaming about low platelets and compromised immune systems and how Andorra needs to be better about washing her hands before coming to see me and how she can't hug me because her tiny arms will surely squeeze me too tightly. Eyes fixated on our hands, I noticed a bruise swelling across my knuckles that I couldn't remember getting, even though it was gruesome enough to be a prizefighter's trophy. I noticed how my hand could fit so small within his own, like a rabbit in the mouth of a wolf. I noticed my own undeniable weakness. "I’m always here." Eyes flicking up, his melancholy-tinged face was just as real as our hands and my moments of make-believe slipped that much further away. "Got nothing else to do, I guess, except sit here and wait." Seconds grew long and heavy enough to burst the few unmarred blood vessels I have left and I found myself thinking: I miss what we were a moment ago.

Maybe it was desperation that made me attempt to rewind time or maybe it was simply stubbornness that caused me to lean in with an all-knowing whisper. "You were waiting for me." My voice was matter-of-fact. As if it were obvious. A given. When I get an idea in my head, it's hard to give it up. Deflecting handshakes is nothing new for me, so although my hand retreated before we were palm-to-palm, I was still determined to hold on to the storyline I was spinning between us.

"So, tell me about this adventure." The moment he leaned in — as if following me even though we were sitting still — we became conspirators. "Where are you going?"

The words hadn't even finished leaving his mouth when I started tutting, my tongue clicking against the air as if he had just answered an arithmetic problem incorrectly. Try again, Casp. Remember, this time one plus one does not equal two. If I'm one and you're one and we're both the same then there's no difference and the answer is still one. "Where are we going? Anywhere we want to go, Casp. Certainly somewhere we haven't been before. Adventures are only good if you're discovering something, you know." My expression was contemplative and devious, a dramatic mask to distract from the way I was busy pulling my knees up to my chest and tugging my hospital gown down over them until I was huddled in the fabric. So the petechiae dotted across my legs could be hidden away. So reality and remembering might be just that much further from us.

Love always,
Charlie