The music slipped and splintered, filling the room with it's buttery chocolate sound…slipping off mirrors, curtains, posters, and finally being burned up by the candle flames. One for love, one for joy.

The twang of a guitar accented her, curved around her eyelashes like the deep kohl she lined them with. Two long notes for each eye, a few short ones to even up the color. Two beats of her drumming eyelids.

Sharp piano for her lips, arching them, bringing out a fuller rose color than ever before. Jamaican Rum it's called. It was the color of deep ocean sunsets, the slightly deep reddish brown of dried blood, or the color of passion. The color of hate and the color of love. She was a moving and twisting expression of color. The music sliding off her skin like murky water. Sliding off pale thighs and buttocks accented by a black garter belt. Off legs and thighs and feet colored with bright blues and pumpkin oranges and dancing skeleton socks. Peace and creativity welling behind her knees and in the arches of her feet. Legs barely held together with blue jeans. The denim fraying in places. Turning to sky blue in places. Fading away in places.

Off pale uncovered stomach that crept up to meet the colors of the forest splayed over her chest. Olive greens, browns, green greens, emerald greens, greens twisting together to form new greens. Greens to hide herself in.

Neck and arms and fingers dangling and swimming in bracelets and necklaces and rings of all sorts. Plastic, metal, fake metal, fake plastic, real plastic, rocks and diamonds, and fake rocks and fake diamonds; cotton twists of thread dyed colors of flowers. Irises, the hearts of Queen Anne's Lace, the bark of trees all wrapped around her slim wrists. Wrists where you could see her heart beat. The rise and fall of little green and blue and purple veins on the underside.
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Thrusting skeletons into beat up girls of shoes. While fingertips of starry nights raced up buttons of a plaid jacket of golds and browns and reds. She flew out the door, an olive green bag bounding behind her. Seemingly suspended in mid air as her wings took her down the sidewalk. Trees growing closer until it seemed as if her wings would catch in their branches, breaking and twisting, falling to rumpled bits of feathers at her feet.

Luckily it was not wings that took her and moved her through the trees. Nor for that matter was it entirely feet and legs and tendons and all the other things belonging to a woman that moved her across the dead branches, roots, dead leaves, pine needles, and possibly broken wings.

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He had broken up with her just a week before. The day after their one year anniversary. A week after saying goodnight and goodbye with an "I love you". One year of perfection thrown like good porcelain at the wall. A little over eight months of giving him everything inside of her.

Giving up the idea of her life being her own, of giving him just a little bit of everything. Like the way she wore her hair, the pink shining through the layer of blonde. The color of her eyes. The way she suddenly realized that if she stopped eating for a half a day, how thin she looked. How good she felt. How the muscle shone through the thin layer of fat and skin.

The way her style changed, shifted like a bird in flight. Her feathers changing color from autumn to winter. From yellow to brown. From happy to dull. From bright colors and prints of flowers and stripes. Shifting to plain blacks and colors that he liked. Blues and reds and browns. Colors that weren't her.

It left her thinking of the way she never really got anything from him. Only material things, rarely ever anything spiritual or substantial. The bunny and gorilla fighting over the place on her pillow. Then fighting for a place of precedence over the sweatshirt that he gave her. That she stole.

The sweatshirt held his smell. Trapped it between the fibers of cotton that held together it's shape. The smell that she spent hours holding close and inhaling. It reminded her of the way his muskiness seemed to spread all over her body and lingered for hours when he held her. Hours afterwards spent hugging herself close and still smiling and smelling him. Even though he was miles away.

Then all of a sudden the warmth was gone. Her limbs always cold these days, always a bit bluer than they used to be. It almost seemed to her that her heart was growing, trying to pump blood through the damaged tissue of her body. It left her feeling as if her chest was tightening sending little lightening bolts down arms and thighs when she thought of him. An annoying weakening feeling that never seemed to go away. No matter what she did. No matter how many times she tried to replace his image in her mind with that of a monstrous dog ripping apart babies. No horror could replace the fact that he left her feeling so hopeless. So annoyingly weak.

Then suddenly as if it was never there, the pain was gone.

She woke up from her sleep on the left side of the bed (always a sign that something is going to change). On her bed sheets Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup whispered into cellular phones about the change. Her teddy dog kicked the white gorilla off the bed, tore the sweatshirt from her clenched fist and replaced it with his paw. All while the paintings John and Divine excitedly twittered with Keanu and The Jester about how, after a week of tossing and turning, of wet pillows, and dreams of spiders, their lovely girl was home. She was back! Her heart was finally shrunk to it's own proportional size.

Her eyes flickered open, seeming to gasp at the sight of the sun so bright, the retinas twitching with relief. The great sky had rolled it's fat self over to show its bright underbelly of blue.

She threw back her covers as they whispered and sighed. Stretched her arms towards the sun streaming through her window and sighed herself. The wisps of blackened stale breath of bad intent merging with the clean. Clean swaths of air flowing in and filling her lungs with happiness.

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The way the key chains on her bag started to annoy her as she ran. The way they announced her arrival like a doorbell, like a bike horn, or a torpedo from a submarine. They disturbed the peace and made her feel like an intruder. Made her feel that the squirrels, birds, deer, wood spirits and maybe even fairies hid at the sound.

The only real saving grace was her shirt that made her feel that if perhaps she covered her legs with leaves she would be a part of nature. That maybe the deer would walk over her and the fairies would make houses in her ears with evergreens and mushrooms as the squirrels buried nuts in her stomach and feet.

Or maybe if she stood on her head the animals would come back, mistaking her for a bush or small tree. Birds would fly through her legs and mistake them for the afternoon sky. Or maybe they would make nests in her stomach, the twigs and bits of their own feathers prickling her skin. Eggs nestled in her belly button.

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His eyes were always the same color as the sky. The pale robin's egg blue of winter. The slight patch of blue one sees when the dark grey storm clouds part. A blue rimmed with grey.

She always felt like an intruder, like a plane in unauthorized skies. Crashing into them blowing the clouds apart, but never really clearing them.

Each eye had it's own secrets. The one saw straight into her. Searing her open. Jogging down her insides, skimming through bones, racing through veins like heroin. The other only brushed the surface with it's iris of clouds. It took in nothing but emotions. Saw nothing but her secrets. Saw nothing but nothing.

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