When I get home Fallon is gone but she’s left her bedroom light on and it shines through the door, a yellow trapezoid on the wooden floor of the kitchen.  I take the Polaroid out of of my jacket pocket and stand in the light and squint at it. I put the photo down on the table, in the dark part of the room, and drop my jacket to the floor.  I pull my boots off one at a time and leave those on the floor too as I walk to the bathroom.  

I scrub at my eyeliner with a black-stained washcloth. I can’t stop thinking of her, of this mystery ghost girl in her Polaroid frame on my kitchen table. 

I take the photo into the bedroom with me and hold it carefully by the corners. She isn’t what I expected but I don’t know what I thought she would be like. 

She is all angles against the wall, elbows and knees, uncomfortable, coltish. Not a lot of makeup. Looks tired but young. Unsmiling, wide eyed, maybe a little nervous. 

I have a hard time imagining this girl with Sasha in all his misplaced tries-too-hard Bowie glamour, his fingerless gloves and his leather.  Everything about Sasha is constructed to scream sex, dirty sex, pills and punk rock and late nights. Nothing about April looks sexy. She’s pretty enough, wide set eyes, full lips. But I can’t imagine fucking this girl. This girl was a ghost even when she lived, a brown and grey mouse.  What did Sasha see in her? What happened to her? 

As I peel off my layers of black and glitter - sequin skirt, filmy grey sweater - I try to imagine her, her soft teeshirt and rough jeans. I try to imagine Sasha’s hands on her skin.  She smells a little bit like dirty hair and something powdery and green: I smell like vanilla and whiskey and leather and cigarettes.  I am loud and loose and brash and dark, she is quiet and closed and wide eyed and pale. Why me after her?

I squint at the photo. April, who are you?

I think again of Sasha’s hands on my thighs, his rings cold against my skin. I see my hips and thighs shrink into hers and I hear her little whimper, her small breath through her lips.  Sasha’s shoulders are broad and silhouetted above me. I sit on the bed in my shredded tights and my black cotton bra and I let my hand slip between my legs. 

I wake up there, like that, a few hours later as the dawn lightens the room, the Polaroid still beside me, my heart pounding in my chest.  I dreamed I woke, in this bed, in this room, to find pennies on my eyes.  One old, one new.

“What was that about last night,” I ask Nico. “With Sasha’s ex. Danielle seemed, I dunno. Weird about it.”

“They grew up together,” he explains, then falls silent.

“And?”

“She took a lot of pills,” he says, and I stupidly don’t understand. I raise my eyebrows at him, all hmmmm?

He sighs. “Like she killed herself, I mean.”

“Oh my God,” I say. 

“He found her,” Nico says after a pause. “He came home from work and there she was on the bed.”

“Oh my God,” I say again.

“Danielle blames him so, yeah. They came here together. Danny and April, I mean.”

“April?”

“Yeah. April. Her name was April.” 

I lie in bed later that night in my coffin quiet Holesovice flat and stare at the pristine white ceiling. April. Her name was April. 

Who was she, this mystery girl, our dearly departed? 

My predecessor: I understand who I am in relation to her, I understand my appeal. Did he love her? Of course he loved her. And why? Was Sasha the same with her, were his hands on her skin the same? Was her voice low or high?  My voice is low and gravelly, nasal, all suppressed Brooklyn accent. April who grew up with Danny, in California, who was she? I imagine her sunny, virginal, blonde – but that’s not Sasha’s type, that can’t be her.

What happened? Why? What did he think — what do you even do then? Do you call the police? A friend? What do you do when the runaway American hardly out of her teens who also happens to be your fiancé turns up dead between your sheets? 

April, who are you?

—

I let myself in and the flat was oddly silent. 

And then I found her on the center of our bed, limbs folded like a newborn colt, her hair tucked behind her ears, in a pool of sunlight streaming in through the window like a cathedral.  Her knees were pulled up to her face and the expanse of the bed seemed enormous, its edges disappearing into the shadows of the room. And on the top of that great expanse, just her folded body, in my sweatshirt, curled up and illuminated.  

I knew right away.  She only ever slept on her stomach.  

Sasha and I are outside his building again, late at night.  The street is dark but for the light above us and something about the slope of the street and the strange quiet reminds me that we are on higher ground, that below us the rest of the city lies half asleep and covered by an early snow, those toy houses scattered down the hillside in their pastel while Sasha and I stand here breathless and in black.

I lean with my back against the cold stone and he rests a hand on the wall on either side of my head, facing me.  He’s beautiful here in his eerie way: desaturated and alabaster, a dark silhouette against the street light behind.   His lips are reddened and cold when he kisses me and the air is snow-silent around us.  

I look up to the sky and all around me everything is spinning, points of white spiraling down from a black velvet sky, collecting in the folds of my jacket and my red hat, the flakes thick on Sasha’s eyelashes as he leans in to me.

—

Sasha and I fuck like we are the same person, wordlessly, mirroring each other, reading each other’s minds each other’s bodies.  Sasha and I fuck perfectly, as if choreographed, as if we’ve been practicing for each other alone. Sasha and I fuck and I feel present in my body because I feel present in his because I feel him present in mine, all of him, all of him. Sasha and I fuck like you think sex is supposed to be.

We are rough in a slow way: my nails sinking into his shoulders, his hands gripping my hips to pull me closer, deeper, his small hands with their silver rings. We are writing ourselves into each other’s bodies, into each other’s skin. I am half mad with lust for him every time I am near him, his intoxicating skin, his breath. 

Sasha’s fragile shoulders and Sasha’s dark hair. Sasha’s flat grey eyes and his grainy voice with that strange accent. Sasha and I fuck like its always the first and the last time. I lose track of things at last: no internal narrative of every last act, no fake moans, no ceiling-gazing while he plows away. My vision goes black at the edges and everything else dissolves. My breath catches in my throat and all my blood rushes to the surface of my skin. Only the two of us are left here.  There is my skin and there is his, my mouth and his, everything and nothing at once.  Sasha and I fuck and I am finally dead and I am finally alive. At last everything else is silent and dark. 

I am a little bit too drunk and everywhere I am seeing Sasha and April and not sure who is who or where or why. The room spins around me, the lights weaving in and out, ribbons of pink and white and yellow, a net around me, cushioned by the noise. 

I push my way though the crowd to the bathroom. The same institutional pastel pink and yellow as my junior high school, cinder block and painted metal. A small white sink and a flat dirty mirror above it.  

The light is warm and yellow and my face looks old and tired and my eyes look crazed. I turn the water on and let it run until the steam rises and I was my hands. I turn off the hot water and turn on the cold water. I splash my face twice and look up and watch the water run down my cheeks, collecting the black of my eye makeup as it travels, black rivulets creeping down to my chin.  White skin black eyes red hair black heart red blood I don’t stop. Who am I?

I dry my face on a rough brown paper towel and look at myself again. I wipe the smears away and cover them with more foundation. I re-line my eyes and I re-apply mascara. I fill in my brows and smack my lips. I look perfectly composed. I look perfectly ordinary. 

I take my lipstick in my hand and lean forward towards the mirror and write over my face in thick red letters:

PORTRAIT DUNE FEMME 
AFFICHE DUNE FILLE 

The cheap waxy lipstick peels and flattens and crumbles as I write. I hold the destroyed tube in my hand, a fat broken crayon. I toss it in the trash and sling my bag over my shoulder and flash a smile at the mirror and walk back out into the main room. 

—

Five hours later. Stare all you want, babydoll, I see you there looking at me down the platform waiting for this first morning tram.  You day begins mine is only just ending. Here I am, your bad example: enjoy your ponytail, your click clack polished pumps. I feel your eyes. I feel them all but yours more so than those of the businessmen that wait here too, this five AM train, their lascivious eyes and their morning boners and me swaying here with my eyeliner down my face. Wearing the red boots Fallon found, April’s boots. Stare all you want, honey: yes this could be you be careful. Yes be afraid I could be your daughter your niece your former self your future self once you find out he’s cheating or once your boss fires you because too many people have seen you on your knees beneath his desk. Keep staring, babydoll. Look all you fucking want. Exhibit A: Evelyn Leigh Kruczynski here, Vivien Leigh, no, Eve alone after the fall. 

Is there glamour in watching the starlet self destruct? Is it me that is falling to pieces or is it April, the virginal pregnant April dead on the coverlet in her cathedral sunlight? Oh god I’m drunk, I’m really drunk now. Which one of us are you rooting for now? April dead in the ground or Evelyn dead on her feet? Our spring sapling April, she unravels, begins to blur with me, winter white Eve ice cold Eve (oh you didn’t think that was my real name did you?) Like the blurring lights around me the threads begin to cross, a new cloth of our loose ends.  St. April the Innocent, our martyr, our lady who art in heaven, where are you? I need your help.

“We went to high school together,” Danielle explains, wiping her nose.

I try to imagine them as teenagers, as friends, Dany Nguyen, April Gutierrez, sixteen and somewhere outside of LA. Who were they? Danielle still stocky, still loud, maybe louder.  Lip ring still in. April her quiet slip of a friend, still the stringy hair and skinny legs and oversized tee-shirt. April with a black canvas backpack pushing her hair out of her eyes, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled down over her hands, holes torn for the thumbs. Danielle snapping her gum. Danielle would’ve been the one with the car. A Volkswagen, a green Bug or a little red or white convertible. April in the front seat next to her, clutching her knobbly knees and grinning ear to ear while Danielle speeds down the freeway. It’s just after sunset and they’re flying down the PCH, hills to one side and the ocean to the other. Danielle in a wild cloud of her pink-streaked hair and bangles flashing on her wrist, April in a thin grey sweater. April’s smile a little toothy, a little too much gum. 

Anonymous asked: where have you been??!?!?!?

• in hiding

• working on a book

• working on other things

          I’m waiting for the tram with a cigarette between my fingers and my hood pulled up over my head and I say, “I had a dream about you.” I say it to April, but she isn’t here.

         “You took me to your house where I had never been, and when we got there your house was very like my grandparents’ house, the same yellow siding and large yard and a small porch and a small garage separate from the house. You took me upstairs, up the brown carpeted stairs I knew from my grandparents’ house, to the room that was my grandmother’s: large and square with windows in two walls, a simple bed with a red coverlet and two dressers and a mirror above one of them, next to the door. The doors were wood and all the doorknobs glass, cut like crystal.

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The homeless in Prague are unlike the homeless in new York: they are beggars, they are supplicants, they are martyrs. They spend the day on their knees with their face against the ground and their hands above their head, palms up. They do not speak or look at you. They disappear, they are part of the street, immobile statues on the cobblestone of the tourist district.  

I think of the snow gathering in the curves of the icy statues on the Charles Bridge two nights ago, of snow on my red hat and on Sasha’s black eyelashes. Black and white and red all over.  I think of April, motionless and curled on her side in the middle of that bed, in her beam of cathedral sunlight, weak and grey and speckled with dust.  Sasha’s sweatshirt too big and her legs folded next to her like a colt’s.  She only ever slept on her stomach.

My classes for the day are over and I’m finally sober after a morning of dizzying nausea and grinding teeth. It’s mid-afternoon, the sky grey and overcast, the wind bitter.  I walk quickly and pull the fur hood of my jacket up.  I stop to buy an espresso and a warm buttery spinach pastry, the first food I’ve had all day, twenty two crowns total, which works out to about eighty-five cents. As I leave the shop I pass one of them, of the beggars, I mean, and for some reason I drop my leftover coins into his outstretched palms. 

He lifts his head and looks at me.

His eyes are so pale that they almost blend in with the whites of his eyes, his pupils pinpoints. His cheeks are sunken beneath an unkempt grey beard. He says nothing but looks at me too long.  I look away and wait for the tram.  It comes quickly, red and cheerful along the dull metal tracks.  When I board I take a window seat near the front of the car. I look out the window and he is still looking at me, eyes bright and faded and terrifying against the shadowed hollows of his face.

We’re finishing some cheap but terrible food - doughy gnocchi, a slightly wilted salad - at an Italian restaurant near I.P. Pavlova and Nico says “Let’s get out of here,” and Dani and I agree.  We pay and leave, walking out into the chilly half-dusk. On the walk back Nico and I stop at a potraviny for a bottle of vodka and some chocolate wafers while Danielle finishes a cigarette outside.

“Where were you last night and this morning?” asks Nico. I make a face.

“I KNEW IT,” he shouts. “Who did you fuck?”

“Nobody!” I protest, pushing the coins across the counter.  Nico sighs. “You can’t lie to me,” he says. “And last weekend? Were you with someone last weekend too? Fallon said you never came home.”

I smile at him, shrug, put the bottle in my purse, and walk out the door.

When we get outside Danielle wordlessly grabs both our hands and starts to run and we follow, shrieking with laughter. We race across and down the street hand in hand, bande á part in the Louvre, Danielle’s hair and my scarf trailing behind us. We reach the door breathless and Nico fumbles for the key and lets us in.

We run laughing up the stairs to their apartment, that cavernous dark stairwell, wrought iron casting strange shadows on the tiled landings. Our footsteps echo, quiet and fast, against the dirty marble. Nico unlocks the apartment door and we pile into the kitchen together.

“Who was it?!” he demands as we catch our breath.

I shrug again. “Nice girls don’t kiss and tell,” I say.

“Like hell you’re a nice girl,” he says.

“If she is then I am too!” says Danielle. Nico scoffs. I laugh and pull the vodka bottle from my bag and say “Drinks?”

“Fuck yeah,” says Dani. “Let me get out of these fucking awful shoes, I’ll be right back.”  

As soon as she’s gone Nico’s on me again, demanding who. I unwind my scarf and peel off my jacket and drop them on the floor next to the yellow kitchen table. I take three glasses from the cabinet.  Nico gets ice and juice from the freezer and I make us three drinks, strong.

“I wish there was any fucking good whiskey for cheap in this city,” I say, wincing at the first sip of cheap vodka.

“Stop changing the subject,” he says. “WHO?”

I smile and sit down and pull a pack of Lucky Strikes from my pocket and offer him one. He takes one and lights it, takes a drag and says ,“You’re a cunt, you know that.”

“I know,” I say.

Danielle comes back barefoot and carrying her laptop, her hair piled on her head and secured with a pencil, and says “What did I miss?”

“Evelyn’s been getting laid and not telling us.”  Nico crosses his arms across his chest.

“For shame, Evie!” she clucks, sliding into a kitchen chair and picking up her drink in the same motion. “What do we feel like listening to?” She leans over her laptop without looking at me.

“Ladytron,” Nico says. “And WHO?”

I take a cigarette from the pack on the table and let out an exaggerated sigh before lighting it. “Fine,” I say. “Sasha. DJs at that club by the bagel place on Wednesdays. Czech, black hair, really pale.”

“Sasha?” says Nico, his voice strained and flat, and then both of them are suddenly silent. Danielle’s hand hovers above her keyboard, a centimeter from hitting play. She moves it to pick up her drink instead and finishes it in one gulp. I hear the ice rattle in the glass and the quiet thunk of the plastic when she places it back on the table.  I hear a door slam elsewhere in the building and the hum of the refrigerator kicks in.

“What?” I say. “What’s wrong?”

Nico and Danielle look at each other.  Nico ashes his cigarette into the shamrock ashtray and then takes a long drag, looks out the window.  I hear the cigarette crackle and watch the tip glow then fade then crumble.

“I thought you knew each other,” I say.

“We did,” says Danielle tersely.

“Oh god.”  I let out a nervous laugh. “You didn’t sleep with him or anything did you? Either of you? I’m sorry! I mean I’m not, if it was anywhere as good as it was — “

Danielle looks nauseated and Nico bursts out laughing and then stops. “God no,” he says, too quickly. “We knew his ex girlfriend.”

“Fiancée,” corrects Danielle.

“He was engaged?” I am taken aback.  Sasha? Engaged?

Nico shrugs. “Before you got here.”

“What happened?” I ask. My own cigarette, neglected, has burned down half am inch, a strange tube of grey ash at the tip. I extend my hand and tap it with my index finger, then let it rest there over the ashtray.

“She was American,” he says after a while. “She isn’t here anymore.”

“She left?”

Nico and Danielle look at each other again. Danielle touches her computer and “Destroy Everything You Touch” suddenly fills the room. She gets up from the table and walks to the fridge. “Do you guys want some sandwiches?” she asks, even though we just ate. “I’m fucking famished.”

2.

April and I in a kitchen, messy, boxes everywhere.   

Her hair is dirty and tucked behind one ear. One knee bent, one too-big bare foot flat against the chipped paint of the stove. She’s holding a near-empty jar of Nutella and sucking on the spoon. There’s no fridge, it’s that kind of old apartment, strange lace curtains still on the windows from the previous tenants. She’s in a white teeshirt and plain cotton underwear, looking as if she’s made of the same faded floral paper peeling off the walls, standing there against the probably broken stove in that old flat, this new flat, our new home, I am understanding this now, this is our home.

“Did you come back for me?” I ask, and she nods, serious now, frowning into the jar of Nutella as she scrapes the spoon along its side.

“Why?” I ask, and she just shrugs.

“Are you back for good?”

April walks up to me and puts the spoon in my mouth and I lick it. She watches me, brown eyes impassive, blank. She takes the spoon from my mouth and throws it on the floor with the Nutella jar and grabs my chin and kisses me, hard, puts a hand on my chest and pushes me back into the wall.

“Sasha,” she calls me. I am breathing heavily now and she wraps her paper-white legs around me. I pick her up and am surprised by how light she is. She is weightless, her skin cool and soft against mine but without mass. I carry her to the bed and she pins me down and I peel off her teeshirt and marvel at her, at the physicality of her, at her almost-powdery skin and her small dark nipples on her nearly-flat chest and her hands, her small hands on my neck now, her thin lips on my neck. I scrape my nails down her spine. Her small body is cold, though sticky with sweat.

We fuck. I am surprised by her strength, by her cruelty. Her face is unchanging and her movements are deliberate. I am afraid of her, April, my love, my ghost, this mouse, my demon girl, sinking her teeth into my shoulder, holding my wrists behind my back. I leave to get a glass of water and when I return she is asleep, stretched out on her stomach with her arms above her head, her skin still damp, strands of hair plastered between her shoulder blades.

I wake in a fever sweat and she is gone.

__
3.

April. April in the morning, shaving her legs in the sink, the clink of her toothbrush in the cup and the pad of her feet on the cold tile, always, every morning.  Her voice high and distant as she hums to herself over the clanging of the radiator and the pipes.  April in the afternoon reading sideways in a chair, white shirt white underwear, bare legs flung up over the arm, bruises, bony feet.  April’s makeup lining the dresser, April’s records, the cardboard sleeves battered and worn. April’s boots on the floor, the old red ones, mud on the toes.  April sleeping on her stomach, her face to the side, drool on the pillow.  April asleep in the hallway in my sweatshirt with her face puffy from crying, the sleeves of the shirt pulled over the palms of her hands.  April motionless curled on her side in a beam of dusted sunlight. 

April’s eyes brown but clear and wide and angled. April whose skin is smooth but like paper, textured and cool. April who smells like something green, something fresh.  April’s hair brown and limp and fine, tucked behind her ears and curling a little at the end. April’s mouth - narrow lips, small teeth - and small hands, short nails.  April my heart my hands my breath my soil my soul. April my lungs my shadow. April my winter, my dark, my as-yet-to-come spring. April who is here, who is always here, April faded and looking out at me from the polaroid next to my bed, April behind the torn lace curtains behind the doors behind the walls, April in the other room in my breath in my bed, in my bed next to me at night, her hands around my waist around my neck. April you are choking me April I can’t breathe April please. 

1.

I take the box of Polaroids from Vojtech and shuffle through them.  Danielle in her shop, wearing a floppy hat.  Nico and Linnea and Marc, Marc trying to pick Linnea up, her limbs flailing. 

We’re all still wide awake when we get home and for some reason we decide to run a bath. We take off our shoes and walk to the bathroom.  We stand in front of the bath, the three of us, Jonas the shortest one in between Linnea and me. We wait for the enormous tub to fill up, the water steaming, slowly filling the room with fog, clouding the window and the mirrors.

Jonas unzips my dress for me. I’m not wearing a bra and he says,  “Well then!”  I laugh and shrug - it’s not like I really need one - and get into the bath, topless in my Calvin Klein boyshorts. “Whatever,” I say. Linnea laughs and pulls her t-shirt and cotton bra over her head, and then peels off her jeans and her green polka dot socks.

Linnea, holding the pint bottle of vodka, slips into the bath across from me, in purple boys’ briefs. As she lowers herself in, the water rises higher on my legs, so only my kneecaps are out of the water. Her underwear must be new as they start leaching hot pink into the water. We watch the dye as it swirls, like milk in coffee, with almost reverential fascination.

Jonas sits next to us on the floor, on the orange carpet, and leans his head on my shoulder.  He hands us each a cigarette and Linnea and I lay back and light them, our heads resting on opposite ends of the tub, our legs touching.

Linnea closes her eyes and tilts her head back and lets her hand hang from the bathtub, smoke trailing up to the ceiling, and I really look at her: her features are model features but not quite pretty, strong nose, square jaw, straight brows, shoulder length wheat-blonde hair dyed black, a quarter inch of roots. Her chest is nearly flat and next to her and Jonas I feel suddenly oversized, too full, overripe. I stare at her nipples, small and dark and just out of the pink-tinted water. She lifts her head to look at me. I stare straight back.

All I can think about is leaning forward to kiss her, the water warm around our legs and her mouth that will taste of cigarettes and vodka, but Jonas is climbing into the tub, now also in his briefs.  Linnea laughs and hands me the booze and we pull our knees in to our chests to make room for him.

I take a swig from the bottle and hand it to Jonas, who is now sitting cross-legged in between Linnea and I. “My love,” I say, passing it to him with exaggerated affect, and he leans back over the edge of the bath and tilts the bottle up and takes a long drink and hands it back to me. “Fuck you, my sister, my twin, my love,” he says, drunkenly, dramatically, and Linnea says “Jesus, both of you, fuck you.”

Jonas leans towards her and lisps, “Pretty please?” and she says “In your dreams, faggot,” and leans forward to kiss him.  She takes her hands out of the water and places them on either side of his head and I watch the water drip down his neck.  I take another swig of vodka as they separate and we all burst out laughing. Jonas takes my hand in one of his and hers in the other, like we’re praying the Our Father, and looks up at the ceiling and says: I will never love anyone like I have loved you, forever and always. I know this. I know.

Anonymous asked: U remind me of Cat Marnell.

sigh

Mid-April. Morning, grey.

I open my eyes to unfamiliar light.

The flat is nice: small, top story, some sort of attic space with slanted ceilings. The bed is white and the furniture simple, an Ikea wardrobe and a table stacked with books and magazines. Black jeans are draped over a wooden chair and men’s shoes — combat boots, converse, a pair of black brogues — are strewn about. I sit up. I am naked on the white sheets. My black dress is on the floor with a pair of ripped tights and my boots and my canvas bomber jacket. My purse, strangely, is hung from a hook on the door.

There are condom wrappers on the floor and suddenly I realize my thighs hurt, they are bruised, they are really bruised, and my stomach sinks then rises and my vision goes black at the edges and I run from the bed and there’s a bathroom across the hall and I throw up, in the sink, my knuckles white clutching the porcelain. My vision clears and I stare at myself in the mirror, bloodshot red eyes and smeared black mascara.

He uses the same hair products as me, lined up on the sink. The same cologne my ex boyfriend wore. The same toothpaste as Fallon.

On the kitchen table is half a French press of coffee and a mug and a note. All caps, sharpie, on an index card. You’re gorgeous, I had a wonderful night. Needed to leave for work but let yourself out whenever and help yourself to what you need. Bisous, Matt.

I sit at the table, still naked, try to align this with the bruises on my legs and the condom wrappers and the last thing I remember: a second or third drink, Matthieu brought to me, it wasn’t even late, I hadn’t taken anything, I had finished my set, I had eaten dinner I never black out I never black out I didn’t even drink enough to black out, what happened how did I get here what happened what did I do, what did I do, where is the night what did I do.

It will be months before I even let myself consider that something was done to me rather than something I had done.

I will remember a few things: crying in a cab, I was crying and saying no. I said no I remember saying no.

The things Matthieu and I had talked about before our DJ set that night: Sleater Kinney and how sad I was about breaking up with Caroline. 

I will remember him on top of me: hairy and heavy, pale and fleshy with black hair.  Glimpses in the dark and I can’t tell if I’m crying anymore.

Sasha and his girl body his small strong hands Sasha’s hands on my thighs these bruises not from Sasha’s hands, Sasha’s blue eyes Sasha’ scars.

“the blue or the white dressing gown? Yes, yes, yes….”

I throw up again, this time in the toilet, the seat already up, he lives alone. My hands at my sides and holding back my hair, I don’t want to touch anything he has.

I pick my clothes up from the floor and throw out the condom wrappers. At least he did me that favor. My hands are shaking as I pull my tights back on and lace up my boots. I put on red lipstick. I hold my hands in front of me until they stop shaking and then I open the door and walk downstairs and feel my boots firm on the ground.

Outside I am lost. I try to remember if Matthieu has ever said where he lives. I am in one of the valleys. I see the suicide bridge above me, the hill and station where Sasha lives near Vyšehrad. I wander until I find a tram number I recognize and I wait. It is raining a little bit and I pull my faux-fur lined hood up over my head. 

I let myself into my flat.  Fallon is not there. I take my clothes off and sit in the shower with my knees pulled in to my chest. I stay like that until the hot water runs cold and then I stay there still with the cold water running over me and it doesn’t feel any different. I do not cry.

I brush my hair and braid it, then unbraid it, and then look at myself in the mirror, wet hair and wide eyes, blank face.  I put on lipstick again.  I put on white underwear. 

I fall asleep on Fallon’s bed and when I wake up it is dark and my phone is beeping. It is a text from Matthieu. Do I want to meet him at his friend’s organic wine bar in Old Town later.

Who would say that to someone they had just raped?

What have I done?

I fumble though Fallon’s makeup bag for a Vicodin and take it with a shot of cheap vodka and then text back yes, of course, I’ll meet him at nine.

Anonymous asked: Did you get fired from your job? Why'd you leave the fashion industry? Becoming a bit too catty for you?

GONNA QUIT MY DAYJOB AND LIKE, BE A WRITER, MAANNNNNN

no idk the company i was at restructured n stuff, wasn’t anything malicious or dramatic