Everyone said it was a good idea. But I disagreed. I thought it was the best one I'd ever had. And considering my mind set and the way people fed off of the shit that I spilled out, either from my pen or my own damned mouth, that was saying something. Considering the way I only talked down on myself, any inner appreciation was going to be a significant approval.

Anj and I had finally, at Madison's insistence, watched Kill Bill. My conclusion? Tarantino was a fucking genius. There wasn't much more to it than that. Granted, the quality of our rip was shitty, but that's what you get when you're a poor college student downloading things for free off of whatever server you can get your firewalled hands on. Beggers can't be choosers. I never knew how true that was. You should have seen the version of The Butterfly Effect that I had. It was a cam rip, which in layman's terms, means one brave soul had enough balls to smuggle a video camera into a theater, set it up, and film the movie off of the damned projector screen as it was playing. Pick your jaws up off the floor, already. Like it's anything new? People will do anything to get something that shouldn't be available yet.

Now, I'd seen some shitty rips before. The Matrix Revolutions was my first and utmost favorite, partly because Madison and I were so obsessed at the time that we couldn't possibly handle waiting five or six months for the bastard to come out on DVD.

Five months? I had the thing on my C drive five days after its release date. I love connections, especially the ones you can't detect. My mother told me it was illegal. I told her nothing's illegal unless you get caught.

I still believe in that now.

But I'm off topic again. The point is that the only available version of The Butterfly Effect was a shaky, blurred version from a video camera with the scratchiest audio imaginable and a color quality that my former video tech teacher, Robert Bell, would have cringed at. I couldn't believe it. If you're going to pirate shit illegally, at least do a respectable job.

Again, I'm off topic. I always get off onto tangents. My mother still has to fight to keep me on topic whenever we're trying to have a conversation. We'll be talking about school, I'll change to talking about my friends, she'll ask a question about one of said friends, and I'll take off instantly into another entirely different story that has some remote connection to the previous topic, which at this point is completely lost on me.

See? There I go again. So before this gets any worse, I'm going to grab a Pepsi, slap myself across the mouth, and jump without any further bullshitting back into the night I was previously attempting to describe.

Ow, that hurt.

As I was attempting to say. The rip of Kill Bill claimed muffled audio and a darker quality image than I'd have liked, but it was acceptable. Anj and I got through it in just under two hours, and shared similar views about the whole damned thing. Fantastic camera angles, good story, strong actors, the whole deal. By the end of the night (technically, the morning, since it was two a.m. on a Sunday when we finished this) quotes from the script were on my away message and new icons were uploaded to my LiveJournal in addition to the Uma Thurman image on my desktop wallpaper.



I get addicted to things very easily. This wasn't any sort of exception. Hell it was a live action anime. And I'd grown up on anime, animation, and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers simultaneously, adoring each in their own individual respects. Kill Bill was all of these and then more rolled into one, topped off with a sort of cosmopolitan flair that only Quentin could have managed.

Quentin was definitely the man. Baz Luhrman had definite competition from this man. Then again, Moulin Rouge and Kill Bill really didn't have too much in common.

There I go again.

Now, you're probably wondering, how the Hell does this person intend to go anywhere by blabbering on about an illegally obtained movie involving mass slaughter and random inserts of animation? You're probably wondering who I am, where I'm from, and just what I'm drinking out of this Pepsi can, because you're probably relatively convinced that it isn't a soft drink, or rather, a soft drink without additions.

Well, I'm happy to clarify.

If I told you the entire story now, we'd be here far longer than needed. Besides, telling takes too much time. So I'm opting to show you. But I do warn you now, by the time you finish reading (or watching, depending on if this thing ever actually makes it to the silver screen), your opinion of me will most likely not be what it was when you first started. It will either be far more or far less, but I highly doubt it will remain the same. Then again, you could be the exception.

There's always one of those somewhere.

But I'm going to stop pissing around and get directly to the point. When everything began, I was a teenager in love, in every aspect of the term. It lasted for awhile, not without heartache and all the jazz that goes with it, because that was just supposed to be part of the way things were, right? Love bites, Def Leppard always sang, so I thought it was true.

Sure, love bites. But love isn't supposed to maim and maul and deform. It isn't supposed to suck the tears from your eyes and re-deposit them back onto your face laced with mascara and makeup to dry there until morning. The person that claims to care about you isn't supposed to enjoy ripping your heart out on a regular basis.

Right? No one's that heartless.

Right?

Yeah, I was that naive, too. Naive enough to believe no one could hurt a good person just for the sport of it. I never believed it was possible.

Then I met the one girl that did.

Yes, girl. I am a girl, she is a girl. You're about to embark into a lesbian love story, so if any of you share the same opinion of George W. Bush (yes, the man was president for a term, or possibly two – it's an election year) about gay marriages being things of the Devil and needing to be banished from the planet, then here's a nice big double dose of 'Fuck off' to you, and please proceed through your sheltered, close-minded lives accordingly. I don't have time for any shit, especially with crap like that which really doesn't matter. It wasn't about the gender of the person I loved.

It was about the person that I loved. Love.

Yeah, still trying to figure that one out.

So the story is going to start in the present day instead of flashing back to the past, because there's no point in trying to dig up an actress to play the part of me two years ago, and I know that I'd get off on a million more tangents trying to start from the beginning. Which is why I'm taking this approach. We're going to start the day after my first viewing of Kill Bill.

Madison was three doors down the hall, and relatively concerned about my mind set. Lunch in the university cafeteria (yes, we'll take to calling what they serve down there 'food') had consisted of my silence and her and Audrey trying to draw a smile out of me with talk of my future plans as a major director on Broadway. It wasn't working today. The object of my affection had struck again, this time at three in the morning, dropping another bombshell (this will all make sense soon, I promise) that left me with a silent demeanor and a broken heart for the countless numbered time. I wasn't someone that I would want to be around, but for the reason that they are and always will be 'my girls', they tolerated my nasty state of mood, even when I couldn't be cheered.

But Madison and I are often on the same wavelength, and when we started talking through instant messages about the movie, I related some of what I'd been feeling to Uma Thurman's character of The Bride in Kill Bill. The rage, the anger, the desire for revenge at any cost because that was all that mattered. Of course in my story no one had died, but the underlying emotion was still there. Someone hurt me badly, therefore I wanted to hurt them back – only far worse than they had. Revenge doesn't always have to balance out.

I'd been known to pour out my thoughts and feelings into writing, either typing or longhand. It was just how I coped with things. Madison knew this, of course. So it was her suggestion that I take my feelings and make it personal. It was a very good idea.

What Madison probably didn't expect was that I was going to do just that.

And that's where the story really is going to start. The setting is a college dorm room in the southwest region of the United States, in the middle of a relatively bitter winter month devoid of any chance of precipitation. Anj is gone for the moment, leaving me to my thoughts, and as always my gaze turns to rest and fall on the silver framed picture at my bedside, just behind the cell phone that has been silent all morning.

The object of my affection, and the source of my frustration.

Her name? Jade.

My name?

I can't very well disclose that sort of information, though I'm sure that a few of the people that know me from any sort of real life have already figured out my identity. I'm waiting for that very cell phone to spring to life with text messages and calls, my computer screen to be flooded with messages and inquiries as to whether or not I've really gone off the edge this time. But that's fine. The point is, I'm not going to tell you my name. Not now, not ever. That sort of information could put my family in danger, and I can't have that. I don't care about my own well-being, just that of the people I care about.

So I won't use my name during this story, or at any other time. Instead, I'll use what Jade used to call me.

During this tale, my name is Helen.

And this is what happens when I go over the edge.