The Inkblot Caveat-

{Rydon}

If there were words to describe this feeling, I would have put pen to paper a long time ago.

He is under my skin, he is breaking all my bones whenever I think of him.

I thought I was rid of him.

I thought if I held a funeral for the Beatles and put on bowties I could become what I always wanted to be.

I thought I could turn myself into an always-smiling portrait and be frozen in time, unable to speak, scream, cry.

I was wrong. This feeling never goes away.

My words falter. I am running this personality through the filter of two other people's mindsets before sewing it to my own pale, scratched skin. When I sign autographs, I'm unsure of whose name makes it to the paper. My cheekbones are lusciously sharp under my pale, drum-taut cheeks.

Spencer says I don't look so good. I bite the inside of my cheek and smile. You wouldn't look so good either if you hadn't slept in 72... no... four days, I can't do the fucking math at this point.

Spencer says I haven't looked so good since London. Why do you think that is, Spencer? Could it have been the effortlessly thin, brown haired waif of a cocaine-whore Beatle standing there with that blonde slip of a thing wrapped around him, staring up at me like I was Hendrix? No. That couldn't have been the reason I fucked up my notes and gasped audibly into the microphone and started crying in the middle of Northern Downpour. You're wrong. You're an idiot.

Spencer, stop saying WORDS I am past too tired and every inch of me aches and oh GOD remind me why I don't drink. Oh right, (I collapse onto my bunk in what feels like slow motion) because of some pretty-eyed guitarist with naive lips and a bruise on his cheekbone and a father who smelled like Manhattans and cigarettes.

I remember his caramel eyes in my biology class and how I crushed a test tube in my bare hand just looking at him and how he was so flawed that he was perfect, how he knew every Beatles lyric I'd ever forgotten, how he bit his lip just so as he raked his pick over the strings of his Les Paul, how we shared eyeliner and wore each other's hoodies and slept tangled together in one small tour bus bunk and I press my hand to the window like he used to do each night, staring out into the sweeping darkness, the streetlamps strobing as they flew by and the intermittent pulses of light on his face were morse code telling me that I loved him.

My eyes are surrounded by dark circles. It is the fifth day since I have even tried to sleep and I can see the veins in my wrist as though they are a small, shifting, stretching blue street map. I try not to think of the word Young as I flex my wrist back and forth, hand lolling in front of my face. Spencer asks me if I have been eating. I tell him only my words.

You need help, I hear dimly. London. What happened in London?

Good question. Too many answers. My entire brain was removed for a split second and then was returned to my head as liquid. The blood flowing through my circulatory system spontaneously fried into little chips of broken glass, like sand does if you heat it enough. Dr. Manhattan vaporized me like he did to Rorschach and then put me back together again without my lungs. I died of consumption in the arms of my perfect English writer lover backstage of the production at the Moulin Rouge. I fell off the edge at Reichenbach Falls.

London, london, london, I sing. There's no place like London. The veins in my wrists become a tree instead of a street map and I start to cry. My sobs are empty, howling, hollow. My cheeks are dry. I've run out of tears.

I wake up with an aching head and something warm pressed up against me, head on my shoulder. I move my hand to pet what must be my dog, which one I can't tell yet, and my hand encounters long hair.

Too long.

I force my eyes to flutter open as dying butterflies would in one last grand gesture to preserve their beauty and I see chocolate covered caramel. I smell cigarettes. I see this skeleton key wrist and bone slender fingers locked around my own icy ones.

I see the words mad as a hatter thin as a dime scrawled up a milk white elbow in indelible, harsh ink.

I smile. This is what people must mean by seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. What a pleasantly impossible, perfectly glorious hallucination. All the stigma about dying is vastly overrated.

I kiss the top of his head and close my eyes again.

Last words were never my forte. I choke out a laugh.

"Are you awake?"

The voice is too rough. Too worn. I get this fleeting image of a pretty girl picking at a hangnail. This fleeting image of an x-ray of a broken clavicle.

"Brendon... please. Please. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry..." He rasps, and I have heard this voice in my nightmares, my wet dreams, every moment I am by myself, in every memory I've ever had since clutching at the shards of test tube in my bloody hand, crimson dropping into our pure distilled water beaker.

"Oh, thank God!"

A blurry, glassy shape above me exclaims as if I've just woken up from a bottle to the face in Reading.

I get this fleeting image of the Mona Lisa.

I feel wet tears sliding down my cheeks and a dry click in the back of my throat that is syncopated with my sobs and that is why he's not in focus, and my lips are trembling, my chest is heaving, his eyes are shining and his breath is combatting mine for the same airspace.

"I h-hate you so m-much..." I stutter and clasp my zombie arms around him, my fingers digging grooves into no doubt paisley fabric.

"I know..." I feel his lungs flutter against my side and a foreign teardrop hits my slick, pale, perfectly taut cheeks.

"Believe me, I know."

He kisses me.

I don't resist.

If there were words to describe this feeling, I would have put pen to paper a long time ago.