There was this moment when all he could do was grasp his chest as his eyes spun like little children and the air froze like ice in his throat. In the almost bare/naked room with the echo floors and hollow walls where they used to sleep on futons and drink champagne from the bottle with a straw- this room that was home until it came and took her and ate her and consumed her blood and his love and their pain and everything that ever was. It came and destroyed without even knocking at the door, it entered and ruined and wrecked and roared. When he asked her to stop but she couldn’t and she wouldn’t and they knew that she shouldn’t make him suffer when his devotion was the only thing that had kept it from engulfing her sooner- she did it anyways. This was the effect of the junk in her veins that didn’t have a name until she was cold in his arms and her body was like the dolls she used to destroy as a child. She had hated them because they had no life to fuck up, everything was butterflies and pointy boobs and legs unrealistically long and hair that melted when you burned it- she hated them because they had no shitty little days that were like nails in your car tires or chocolate on your shirt front. Instead, those damn dolls were the billboard whores who didn’t care if they can never have sex because they’re made of ugly sick coloured plastic.

But that wasn’t what he was thinking. He was thinking of the lives that were screwed from the same thing that fucked her veins and he figured it was his fault because he did it first. But he stopped. She didn’t. She kept going, even when she cried in his shirt because she knew it was killing both of them, she hid in the bathroom and when she came back, little dark flower petals bloomed in the crook of her arm and a red line about her bicep showed where the cord had blocked the veins. He knew she’d die with or without the shit.

So this moment when his fingers grabbed at his heart and his eyes were like trapped birds and the air in his throat was like hail, it was the moment she was gone forever.

He didn’t follow.