“Honey, neither of us are talking sense. None of this makes sense. And tomorrow of tomorrows, no one will ever find out what makes sense and what does not. Why the fuck do you care? Making sense, such a joke.”
“You just haven’t had enough of my suffering yet.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Because you are addicted to my pain. The taste of it just makes you wild, doesn’t it? It’s exhilarating to walk on glass, and it brings the same sort of exhilaration when you step on the pain of another.”
The girl on the chair puffs her cigarette. Not her last, not her first. Around her, on the table, are a dozen unopened cigarette packs, and the empty ones are scattered on the floor. She has been here since this evening, but it feels like she has been here since long before. Longer than the first step of a human on Earth, and certainly she will be here until the last human dies on Earth. She sits there, thinking, “This stuff is funny, how can she let herself be this pitiful?,” thinking, “I really must go home, I don’t even know how else I can make it more insufferable both for her and for me,” wondering, “God only knows how painful it is to be living, and that’s why He’s up there, looking down on us, thinking always that He’s the lucky one,” wondering, “What if all the what-ifs become reality?,” saying, “God, look at the time.”
The girl on the bed does not answer. She tucks her hair behind her ears, drinks cold coffee, leans on the pillow, and looks at the ceiling. Her body curves show through the sleeping dress. All the femininity within her shows through the half hidden, half revealing outfit. The silk slips on her skin like water dripping down leaves. If the girl on the chair stays silent, she can almost hear the water falling, falling, falling on her eardrums like the sound of a lullaby she had heard long ago. A few had died so the young ones can grow. A few had chosen to stand up at the broken place so the ones who had fallen could fertilize the earth. No life is too precious to lose, and none is too trivial to leave behind, broken and forsaken though they might be. The girl on the bed thinks of the guy she met yesterday, then the guy she met three years ago, then the guy she met long before she had even known the deceptively sweet taste of betrayal. After all, how cheap is the phrase “I love you”? She reckons if she said it one, two, three thousand times, the phrase would be dead, too.
