There's a demon in my stomach that won't get out, and his motive is to infiltrate my mind as well. He materializes in the static blinds of the window, spectral from a dichotomy that should have never transpired for the foreshadowing of what is to come, and his chant hollows out the eaves of my heart with a necrotic rigor, so I've become unsusceptible.

Blackness stills the room and stashes paranoia where it should never go — in the lacustrine valleys of my lungs, where water massacres any trace of oxygen for its own harrowing grace — so all I can do is accept my fate.

A box inaugurates the inveiglement of my interest, and as I approach, I realize that it's nothing significant, that it can just be pelted at the floor without consequences, so my fingers balter around it and exile the object to the ground.

The fragrance it fashions is a svelte pirouette within the walls, if only to my ears, but to other people it's a war cry, and they'll soon be armored for battle.

Without a prior alert, the door tiptoes forward, and the rarely meek form of Dallon slides past. "I heard a noise," he explains, frame still trussed in the threshold.

"You couldn't have," I reject blankly.

"Is that because the door is locked, or is it because you don't think anyone cares enough to help you?"

"Try and find out." My brows would usually be baked in sarcasm on any other occasion, but the only thing into which they're baked is asphalt, so my friend takes up the duty.

Dallon's mouth is crucified in a smirk, dots of rose clinquant in nails and binding. "I know you well enough — I don't have to."

"It's been two years," I counter. "A lot can change."

A sneer razes Dallon's lips, and a quip is soon dribbled after "Yet you're still the same stuttering clown."

"I thought you were here to help." A cold stare deters the man, and his goals shift abruptly.

"Right." Discretion epitaphs my attacker's face, and his attention stems from another area, rather than my unfortunate speech patterns. "Why are you crying?"

"The money question," I chuckle impassively. "I'm always crying these days."

Dallon seems genuinely confused. "The old Patrick didn't do that."

"The old Patrick is gone." The martyr of a warning flitches my tone, pounding its feet into the wood scraps with an implacable determination. "A lot can change in two years," I repeat.

And it's true, even if Dallon won't agree to it, because many changes have held on tightly throughout these dreary months, and denying it is making a fool out of yourself. For example, Dallon wears gloves now. I wash my arm in hydrogen peroxide as a compulsion and shudder at the thought of the past. Dallon hasn't even said my name until now, and it all contributes to the notion that we are not the same as before, not in the slightest, and though I've experienced enough stress sprouting from these affairs, I can't help but wonder if we're even the same corporeal people at all, if that's even a guillotine for nostalgia.

But we have to be the same people, at least in a biological perspective that dictates the concept that seven years create a new identity for someone, and from that ideology, some part of me has staggered in the aroma of Dallon's house, and my memory of it is still partial.

In seven years, I will be someone who has never touched Dallon Weekes, and that phrase kept me going in the time after our relationship was decapitated, and now that he's back, the count has started again, but seven is irrational when we've already been altered so much in two years, so our lives will have changed with the same precision as seven, and at least in mind, I will be whole, and my body will have to follow five years later.

For now, however, I have yet to reach a seven year mark, whether it be from two years prior to this moment, or commencing this week, and I know that my skin remains to be lapidated by cigarette smoke and entombed in formaldehyde, and I know that I can't truly let go while my cells are pining for the home of Dallon Weekes, even when it's far gone from me, and the porcelain surface that I have strived so completely to achieve is now just matted against betrayal.

Though too often humans dream of porcelain skin, but they should realize that blood shows up better on such a terrain, and with that phenomenon, suddenly those cracks on my flesh don't mean as much as they did, because I've made it clear to everyone that I'm a screw up, that I'm a failure, that I'm nothing to be concerned with because I'll end up ruining the people around me in the end, and I've always been chipping away in their perception.

I seem so self-aware when I say this, so confident that others hate me, but the thing about receiving hate is that it's just having your own words extracted from the mouth of another, but with this you have someone to blame, and because of that, people may not hate me as much as I think they do, but then again, my voices will return if I challenge my own bigotry, and that's a risk I don't want to take.

Yet I'm internally puking, and Dallon is still with me through it all, though without the knowledge of my malady and only the small hint of it, and he's nevertheless as quiet as I've seen him, orifice raked into a line as he waits for my ruling which blooms soon after.

"We're nothing like we used to be." Commonly, tears would be exhumed from my lids, euthanized by a grove of spines called lashes, but in this situation, any recollection of water is but a ghost.

As Dallon's head lurches downward, bones of sienna locks crane to the floor with a somber tone itching the peaks, and his voice is soft and mellow. "I know."

"No, you don't." My head clears a horizontal path, stalwart in its fidelity and gravelly in its undertones.

"I had to experience it, too."

"Wrong," I nullify. "You were off the hook, immune to this hell, while I had to encounter it wholeheartedly."

Dallon's neck slants to the side, prepared for a battle. "I'm wearing gloves, aren't I?"

"And will you tell me why that is?" I snap, enraged by his sardonicism.

My attacker shrugs, quickly indifferent, and he leaves me with a simple vow. "You'll figure it out."

Before he exits, however, my hand chews his shoulder and halts him, and my brows sew a curtain around my eyes. "Dallon, why are we like this?"

The man pivots hesitantly. "Like what?" It's obvious that he knows what I'm talking about, but admitting to it has never been his forte.

"All we do is fight," I complain, my voice a sparse whisper of the trees in the wind. "We used to have something. Where did that go?"

"Deep into the floorboards," Dallon reminds me with a cursory nod. "You know what we left there."

"Our virginity," I banter, and a chuckle gongs my partner's lungs.

A smile masticating Dallon's entire countenance, the pleasure soon fades from the skies of his sapphire gems. "You know, it's really fucking nice to laugh again."

"Yeah," I concur, with the bantam of a mouse crawling from my trachea. "All we do is fight now."

"And over what?" my old friend derides. "I'm still not sure."

"I guess we're terrified of what we used to have, and because it's not visible right now, we don't ever adventure to find it."

"It might still be there." Hope forms a shivering hemorrhage in Dallon's eyes, but I tilt away from the temptation.

"Dallon, no..."

"Well I remember things, don't I?" Dallon begs. "I remember how you bit your first cigarette when you were learning how to die. I remember how you nursed a finch back to health without resting. I remember how you discovered a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the cabinet and became obsessed with its properties. I remember how you departed without a clear reason and made a monster out of me, and I remember how we were both all alone.

"But you still loved me, didn't you? That's why you left, because you didn't want your psychosis to injure anyone, but your psychosis didn't take your emotions away. They might have altered them, yeah, but you were set on standing by me until the last moment nevertheless. Is that person gone?"

"No," I murmur, a storm of courage taking a stiletto to my fear. "He's in my arm where I left you. He's in my feet as they wound the floorboards. He's in my lips from their surface to yours. He's—"

Just as I had said, Dallon's lips scrounge the brick of my own, a vendetta docked in a sea of blood as it drowns into nothingness, and the rhythm of the kiss organizes our heartbeats, thudding within the blank space so that our vigor is constant.

It's like a drug, the kind I use to describe this man, in the way that an addiction is my sail amidst an ocean of treachery, the only one that persuades me into trusting it because my surroundings are too captivating for my own good, and I used to coming back for more in the time that I actually knew Dallon Weekes.

Then rehab came in a metaphorical sense, and that affliction was all just a morning mist that you look at and feel a bit of sadness before you go on, and now that it's returned, I don't know what to expect, because I feel myself slipping back into that pattern, back into that addiction, and for some reason, I'm not worried about it.

Drugs make people sick, but I was already sick when this all started, so I tricked myself into believing that I couldn't get worse — I did.

I'm not ready to visit mental rehab again, so I unravel my lips from Dallon's, and all so abruptly, the door to the bathroom is gilded in fear, wrapped up thoroughly with a steadfast lock, and any intentions to come out are then thrown into the void.

Contagion besets my throat, hammering lances into the sides so that it may climb higher and purge my stomach of its existence. This plague suddenly makes the trash can look all the more appeasing, the recycled bag within it so limber and ready for my troubles.

I advance towards it, an asphodel of fluid beleaguers the roof of my mouth, and its axis tumbles into the waste bin with its autonomous nativity and its putrid sound.

"Are you all right in there?" Dallon inspects, tapping frantically upon the door as the noise constructs a screen around it.

"I'm fine," I croak through an obfuscated airway.

A sigh pervades the wood of the door, disappointed in my response. "Stop lying to yourself."

"I'm not lying," escapes as a protest, though it's unfounded and flimsy.

"That's because you hate it, but 'I'm fine' has become so common that it's not considered a lie anymore," Dallon dictates, and I hear his torso festooning the structure between us.

He doesn't know it's fake when he spawns medicine from a gentle tongue, and the only thing that can solve medicine is a stomachache. On the flip side, the only thing that can solve stomachaches is medicine, but with disproportionate supplies, they chase each other.

But is this even medicine? Is this even a stomachache? Why has common sense become so rare that it's praised when it enters? Dallon's just pragmatic, and I'm just an asinine opportunity for him to showcase his basic human functions. Perhaps, though, this is medicine, and perhaps this is a stomachache, and if so, then it's cross with me.

If I'm acknowledging the probable, I've had the medicine, and it's time for the stomachache, and soon enough I'll be in need of more medicine — but for now I must take care of my current surroundings, in which the stomachache is nearing, in which Dallon anticipates his victory.

I can't give him that.

"How many other lies have become neutral?" I retort, tipped by the trash can as I struggle to formulate words.

"Many of the things you say."

"I don't feel well." Digression is by far the best tactic for affairs such as these, and I nod my head in approval while my attacker can't see it. "Stop pestering me."

"That's a lie, too," Dallon observes, softly rapping on the door with his pointer finger — three times, like he knows I can't deal with.

Instantaneously, as if it's become a routine, and in some ways it has, my hands coil around a bottle of peroxide from below the cabinet and unlace the top, and without thinking, the substance is drained onto my skin.

Impurity warrants this, it howls while subjugating the entire landscape of my arm, and I only agree with its doctrine, because it comes along in the package, and if I need hydrogen peroxide that badly, I'm willing to take it.

Dallon's knocking becomes more hurried, rushed in a sough of wind and the fright that I may harm myself with a chemical that he doesn't truly understand, but hydrogen peroxide will never hurt me, and I will never hurt myself with it. It saves my life everyday, and people are a dunce if they think otherwise. It provides a passage from the nightmare Dallon caused, and now he's anxious about my use of it — idiot.

"What are you doing in there?" Dallon asks, pitching his voice at a loud opera.

"I'm okay."

The peroxide knows I'mlying.

~~~~~

A/N: this chapter oml i gtg

current vibe: sixth grade white boys thinking their opinion matters

~Dakroota