"It was a pleasure to burn."
Self-destruction, Jade decides, is the platform for all things she agrees with: angst, pain, a story. A plotline for her thoughts, a cast list for her own illnesses. An excuse; a conflict; a resolution. Scripting her own death.
Such a pleasure to burn.
/
Jade meets Boy.
Boy likes Jade, Jade likes Boy.
Enter Beck Oliver, the pen to her paper, the light to her dark, the bandaids to her blood.
/
Jade pushes love stories out of her fingertips and the edges of her limbs become fuzzy and threaded and they melt into Beck's arms. Love, love, love. Love is all you need.
/
The honeymoon is over and the chocolates are melted and the flowers are dying. Jade spends hours staring at herself in the mirror. Then she spends hours staring at her wrists. She can still feel Beck's fingers wrapped around her veins.
/
He's planted sunflower seeds in her lungs and although they are beautiful the petals are getting caught in her throat. She chokes and she sputters and she falls.
/
Her fingertips no longer hold the passages of romantic Charlotte Bronte because she's pricked them all and the words have bled out of her. Sleeping Beauty is Shakespeare, tragic and screaming. When she wakes up, her nails are filed to clean stubs and the insides of her wrists are white with gauze. She is in the room of a hospital and as it turns out, her fingers were not the only thing torn apart.
Her father is sitting next to her and there are tears running down his face. Fluorescent lights too high, too bright, too splitting. The world is a wash of artificial color and mechanical hum.
"Where is he?"
The words don't feel like hers. There are marbles in her mouth and strings on her tongue. The petals tickling the back of her throat aren't there. They're just replaced with the taste of vomit and sick.
"Where is who, Jadey?" Her father's eyes are pleading and desperate. Please come back, they say. Let me dye your black clothes pink and curl your hair. Be my little Jadey one more time.
"My boyfriend," Jade whispers. Her lips are chapped and her voice is raspy. "I want Beck." She avoids her father's tearful gaze.
"He's not here. He said you guys broke up. Is that why… is that why you…"
Jade turns to the bowl beside her stiff bed and throws up dark yellow flower stems.
/
Back together, stitched at the waist, protective gazes under a heavy hand. She has put boxing gloves over her palms and has given the Shakespeare in her veins a vial of poison. Charlotte Bronte of her heart has run off into the sunset with Jade's love songs.
The words inside her don't connect into stories the way they used to and there aren't metaphors stuck in her capillaries.
Dead author walking.
After a date with Beck, she picks up her stories and throws them into the trashcan outside. She pulls out her lighter and her matchbox. She lights one for herself and holds it between chapped lips.
She throws another into the trash.
"It was such a pleasure to burn."