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‘You don’t know a single fucking thing about me!’ She screams. I’m not listening. ‘I’m busy balancing dear. Will you please stop all this incessant yelling? You’d think you’d want me back home or something silly like that.’ I jump of the giant tree and walk like a badass all the way to her frame. She’s shaking she’s so mad. ‘I’m so mad! I hate you so much Sage! I wont tell you. But oh man! Mother of God do I hate you! Do you have any idea what you’ve done? I can’t focus anymore. I cant read my homework because it the words aren’t laid out like I want them to be. I want everything to be, as I want it to be! Can you imagine this life inside of me? Can you imagine trying to parade this body around a City that decimates innocence, pushes poverty to it borders, pushes love out of a three-story window. You didn’t die, did you? Then what the fuck are you crying about? That’s what they were screaming at me. I just wanted to dance baby. I just wanted to own every stage in the entire world. I just wanted every light on me. Know what I got? I got every pair of eyes instead. I got strange drool, splashing on my baby thighs. I wasn’t born where I was meant to be. How can I make you understand what they took from me, by feeling nothing, by saying nothing? Fine. Here you go. I’ve got decades full of dead silence. I punish you for every sin ever committed against me. I love you. I do. I love only you.’

‘I love you too. I love that they hate you. Is that so terrible? Its not that I love the hate it’s built in you, though I do. I just hate the things they love. And for the most part I hate them too. Devious little fucks, the lot of them. They took your pretty little fingers in the palm of their hands and helped you down off the giant steps of that train like they were doing you a favor. Poor little girl, she must be bloody fucking exhausted. I’ll carry you. I hold you so tight little princess. I’ll take your words, roll them up in little balls and shove them right back into the mouth they came running from. So eager to know me, so precious, such a pure desire truly doesn’t exist anymore. A dying breed they called me. I believed them. I became the things they saw in me. They took what they knew was worth a billion others. They took the spirit of hundred lifetimes. They took everything I remembered. They took me. When you found me, all I had left was shame. I thought I had let every fucker down. I thought I owed my life to this gross shit. I thought I was awake this whole time. Then I had my very first dream. Then I saw my reflection. It was you.’

She starts running up the side of the canyon. She slips in the mud. Her only clean shirt is dirty. She hasn’t had money for a load of laundry in weeks. She doesn’t have anywhere to dry it. She doesn’t have a spare key to any home in this City. She used to have one; Winnie the Pooh was cut at his teddy bear thighs just right to let her enter my body at her pleasure. She whines. There is no decision she has ever made that could be a mistake. We are not the kind for making mistakes, her and I. We do. Then there is nothing left. Then there is only what is to be done. But even that is only a futile chase. We are doing, our only tense is present. This is the greatest gift. This is our superpower. I run up behind her and start wiping her tears and stripping off her soaked clothes. She lets me take everything, even though we’re supposedly in the public light of day. She lets her muscles fall limp to her sides like a child while I do it. ‘Want to know a secret?’ She whispers into my ear while I have one of her arms over her head, the sleeve is stuck. ‘We all have it? Even the fucks who tried to take mine.’ 

            ‘It?’

            ‘Magic. Walking on water and diving way deep under to rip up stupid fences that weigh our weight time a million. We all have the power to present our body in a single moment only. We all were born dreaming. Then we woke up to this shit. Then we believed it wasn’t dreaming. That’s how we got stuck.’

            I get frustrated and rip the shirt. I flip her over my knee and start spanking her naked ass. ‘I’m 33!’ She giggles. ‘You’re not aloud to spank me.’

            ‘You’re not supposed to be laughing. Remember baby, you’re so furious with me! You’re so angry you could die. You could kill me! You tried and failed, punishment is necessary, you must learn to kill if you ever want off my knee again. Stop talking nonsense and scream. Aren’t you tired of trying to be so convincing all the time? Don’t convince me baby. Be!’

            ‘Let me be. Let me curl up into myself and weep alone. I’d rather drown than harm the life around me. I’d rather die than let you rock me to sleep. You’re not my mommy. You’re not daddy. You’re not anything I want or need.’

            I stand up; throw her to the dirt before my feet. Loop by loop, I pull my brown leather belt from my jeans. I’ve had enough of this crying like a baby shit. It’s time to step up my game.