Last Call

There are days when she tells me that there's nothing left we can do, and I ask her why she told me "we". She tells me there was never a difference; that when she dies, so do I. I say that I already knew that, but she refuses to look at me and I never truly knew, did I. She had brown eyes and twelve wishes, but the wish she wished for the most was for me to survive her, because nobody ever survives love's death. I told her she would never die; she told me I was invincible.

We were both such imperfect liars.

"We". It is the only word she can force from her lungs, the ones that are half-collapsed and refuse to be taken to the ER. It costs too much to save a life, she explains, and I want to know why our lives aren't worth that much. I try to explain that she is more than paper, but she isn't. She is more than anything, and we both know that she'll stay in the flicker of candlelight, stay in the reflections in irises. But I will not, and that makes her laugh because it's so sad; she is killing the soul of a boy she once loved, but no longer.

We were both so imperfect.

Twisted sounds of half-breathing and young blood are nothing but a series of empty promises in my mind-- promises to survive, promises to love something back. And neither can say "someone", because both are filled with something so primal that we aren't human any longer. It's a chemical, it's adrenaline, it's the last call for repair.

We were both so lost.