Shades of Red

Written for my love

“There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”

Ernest Hemingway, a Farewell to Arms

 

You are six years old and your name is Natasha Violet Hudson. Your Ma insists that your name is Tasha, because Natasha is a name for a woman, and you’re a just a girl. But you lost a tooth two weeks ago, and you can whistle through the gap in your bottom teeth as you wait for a new one, so you think you might be a little grown up, a bit of a woman, at least.

Your favourite part of the day is the sunset. You like to take walks through the city and perch on the walls between buildings to watch the sun sink beneath the rooftops and bridges.

(You will one day consider this fact significant to meeting her, that any fewer propensities for sunsets or walks during sunsets would have brought you to a completely different fate, and you shudder at the thought.)

Andrew Peter is the school bully of the first grade, simply because he has an extra ten kilos of baby fat that the other kids don’t, so they gravitate towards him, like smaller moons to a larger globe. There’s no legitimate reason why he’s the most popular kid in school, or why he sees fit to pick on the smaller, less globular kids after school. But he does, like clockwork, each day.

You perch on walls so you can see everything, scope out everything, watch Andrew Peter bellow like a walrus as he gets in some poor sap’s face. You like the bird’s eye view because you are safe, here, to watch Andrew’s gang herd their newest victim into the corner of the school yard.

Today they come barrelling around the corner, to collide with another girl �" now the latest victim �" and knock her to the ground, crumpled, now bleeding, part of the course for one of Andrew’s sessions.

Truth be told, you usually don’t intercede, because you are six years old and when you Ma threatens to tan your hide if you get blood on your dress, you believe her. But sometimes you wish you had a slingshot to hurt the bullies with, pelt pebbles at their heads, taking them one by one. You watch the victim, will her to stay still, lie crumpled long enough so Andrew will get bored and walk away.

But the bleeding girl stands up on shaky legs, and you blink because she is bleeding, elbows and knees turning scarlet, eyes watering, and Andrew laughs, pulls the girl up by the shoulders of her dress and raises his fist.

“Can’t get out of the way, can you Owens?”

The girl looks completely unafraid, small and bleeding and unafraid, and it’s terrifying to you. In a world of brawling Paraparaumu, there is this six year old girl about to get the tar beat out of her, and she couldn’t look more accepting of that fact. Her books are scattered on the ground, one of them is a part of the Anne Rice chronicles. You really like the Anne Rice chronicles.

“No, Andrew,” the girls says, “Don’t think I can.”

The girl smears blood on the building wall when she hits it, a scrawny paintbrush to a brick canvas.

Your name is Natasha Violet Hudson and you don’t usually intercede. You are not a fighter.

But you break Andrew Peter’s nose and send his cronies through the playground howling for their Ma’s anyhow.

You wrap an arm around the girl, and hobble with her all the way home, because you were taught that it’s rude to invite yourself into other people’s home and your tiny house is closer anyway.

“What’s your name?” You ask, because the girl is bleeding all over your dress and your Ma is going to kill you, and it seems the polite thing to do.

“Stella Owens.”

You consider for a moment telling her that your name is Natasha. Because Natasha is a grownup name and you just punched a kid in the face and you think that makes you a little bit less of a girl, a little more a woman. But in the dark of these streets, with a girl’s body leaning on your shoulder, you suddenly feel the weight and space of the world around you, you feel all the molecules and Andrew Peters’ of the world will try and force their way in, take that girl back, and make her bleed. You see it, gaping, an entire world of people and circumstances that will try and break what you have just saved, what you will continue to save, because the girl painted the brick wall with her own blood and didn’t once look ashamed for it. Because no one teaches kids how to stand up to bullies in the first place but this girl had it down pat. Because that’s a kind of ingenuity and pigheadedness that you’ve never seen in your life, the kind that you know people will fight to extinguish.

“Natasha Violet Hudson.” You grin, reaching over and take the girl’s hand and pump it enthusiastically. She smiles, genuinely, and even through the blood on her face, you think you feel just a little bit taller. “But you can call me Tasha.”

You come home covered in another person’s blood. And it will not be the last time.

You are not a grownup, yet.

But you think Stella Owens could teach you a thing or two.

----

You are ten years old and your name is Tasha Hudson.

You’ve got a best friend who says the name like its gospel and your insistent pursuit of the title Natasha fell by the wayside the moment that Stella Owens told you she likes Tasha anyhow.

You spend any and all time that you can with Stella, because without actual reason or rhyme, Stella is the most interesting person in your life and you would happily forget anyone else if it meant that you got to keep her. She is made up of paper skin and soft bones that tear and hurt easily, and the only times she speaks up are when she’s about to get beat down.

There is a part of Stella Owens that makes you still, like the very presence of her in your life is a hand to the shoulder, grounding, comforting. You do not know how else to describe it because you yourself are a force of constant motion, jiggling legs and twitching smiles, always moving, always racing the boys on the playground because you are the fastest and when you go, you fly. Your Ma calls it fearlessness and your teachers call out rowdiness and Stella calls it idiocy and you love that her definition always sounds the fondest. Whatever it is, it means you don’t fit, hyper and quick to anger just as you are to happiness, a paddle with no direction.

You are something of a phenomenon in that you are only ever good when Stella is there to make you better. Which is perfect, because Stella is always there and people like your mother and your teachers love her. People tolerate you, adore and respect and relate to you, but they love Stella, the quite girl with polite manners and soft eyes, and that’s perfectly okay, because you love Stella too.

You do not understand the full implications of that statement, you only know that it is true in the way you have gotten into trouble a lot more over the last four years and that is all because of her.

There is something under your skin that makes you restless, never satisfied, but Stella is your best friend and she only ever placates that edge in you. So with her, you are good.

You never have to learn what you are like ‘without her’ until the week Stella gets grounded, two weeks after Christmas. Groundings and Stella have gone hand in hand pretty much from day one, perpetual talking back and other basic misgivings. But you show up one morning to play and Mrs. Owens opens the door. She always smiles when she sees you, but she is not smiling now.

“Can Stella come out to play?”

Stella is grounded, Mrs. Owens says, in a lot of trouble. Which, yes, you know Stella is in trouble. Stella is always in trouble. But Mrs. Owens says she needs to keep her word and not let Stella have visitors, and to go home to your mother, and tell her hello.

You could, you should, go home. But Christmas was ten days ago, and you got that dress that you had really wanted. You wanted to show Stella, spend the day wandering the side walk, and count the number of times you could make Stella laugh or smile. But Stella is in A Lot of Trouble, so you wander the streets and corners alone, just as you did before you had a best friend.

Crunch crunch crunch go the pebbles at your feet as you trek, whoosh goes the wind chapping your ears and ping goes the sound of pebbles as you pelt them around, not practising aim and purpose to the shots as much as you are simply shooting. Targets are of no consequence when your world is dimmed and your best friend isn’t around. Control is not something you require.

Amidst the corner of Poplar Ave you spot a male fantail, warm brown and singing in the dry air, a melody containing two upwards pitched whistles and series of chattered off syllables. The plain branches of a dying tree cradle it, shield it from the public eye, but you crawl up on a wall and listen, watch, anyhow.

It is very small, delicate like a flower, but very small. When you go to make the shot, it’s almost an afterthought, a joke. You haven’t been able to hit any of the target you’d been throwing at, not dangling pants on clotheslines, nor trashcans nor street signs. You weigh the small bullet in the palm of your hand as you lie flat on the wall, belly to cold brick, and you think you’ll shoot just off kilter enough to scare the bird, watch it take off in a flurry of feathers into the dimming skies.

It’s just a game, like so many things to you are. You feel yourself coil back; anticipatory, reckless.

You shoot, you don’t even bother to aim.

Yet the bird falls, cut off mid-song, brown body on green grass. Its neck is bent, though it does not bleed.

There will be no songs for it to sing, not anymore.

Your mind struggles for a moment to make the connection between visual and concept. Things die, you know this. People like your Dad and Stella’s aunt Catherine have died, tucked away in the recesses of the earth. But you were too young to remember, you were not there for the funerals in a way that stuck with you, but you are there for this death, the first death, death which you have caused.

You look down at your hands. They are clean to your eyes, yet they do not feel clean. You do not feel clean.

You tumble off the wall to vomit, hands and knees sliding and cutting on the gravel covered pavement. This will be the first time you have ever hated yourself, have wanted to remove flesh from bone and remake the mistakes you have carved out in fate. You are so sorry, so so sorry, but there is no one to scold you, punish you for your crime, for the fantail had died quite, and Tasha Hudson doesn’t get into trouble. Tasha Hudson is a good kid, after all.

So you bury the bird under the tree you knocked it from. Shame fills you like boiling water, spilling hot over your cheeks and pooling in your stomach. Your shame, your fault, your death. And in this moment you are a loose cannon, this weird in-between state where you once again find yourself trying to fill the shoes that were never meant to fit you, responsibilities and burdens that stretch beyond your ten years of age and wisdom. You are out of place in that you are trying to be a name that sounds like gospel on your best friend’s lips, but it is not a name that you have earned, not one that fits.

Because at the end of the day, pebble throwing and restlessness aside, you are just a girl, and you have just killed. You are not a murderer, but here you are, burying your first body.

The dead, dry heat of summer creeps down your throat like a gag. You make yourself sick.

And wounded as you are by your own stupid gall and own stupid recklessness, you have but one place to go. So you clamber over fences that you know like the back of your hand and you roll onto the floor of your best friend’s bedroom through the back window, covered in dirt and tears.

“Tasha?”

Stella is bundled up in blankets, but she smiles wide at you. The late afternoon sunlight that spilled through the window with you lets you see her as clear as always. It’s only been a few days since you last saw her, but a few days of utter boredom in Stella Owens’ world is enough to invoke upsetting appearance alterations. She looks like a baby bird that’s fallen straight from the tree, cheeks red with a frustrated flush, body taunt with unused energy, shaking with a nervous hum under the skin.

She looks how you feel, but you don’t know how to say that in words that don’t make you sound like a sissy, so you whisper. “Two days without me and you’re already falling apart, Owens, sheesh.”

When she rasps a laugh in response, it sounds like twittering song.

It has occurred to you before that Stella could get hurt, because you have seen her get hurt and you saved her from getting hurt. But it has never occurred to you that Stella might be taken away from you, that one day you will wake up living and breathing in your world and she will be living and breathing in a different world far away.

And you know that life is sacred but you would rather lose yours that have to be far from your best friend.

So you build her a nest.

You forge a tent of blankets and sweaters from the linen closet; Mr. and Mrs. Owens aren’t home, but you get the feeling that even now, they won’t mind. You balance chairs and tables equally to prop the tent around, a tepee surrounding your punished best friend.

Stella settles, blinking, voice crackly with disuse, “Tash, what’re ya doing?”

“You’re bored.” You say, like that’s all the explanation needed. “Quit your complaining and say, ‘Thanks, Tasha.’”

“Thanks, Ma.” Stella rolls her eyes, but she settles less with each moment you spend under the quilts.

She’s watching you, you’re aware, even as you remove your shoes and cardigan, can probably tell that there is something wrong. But you simply press your girl body to her bird body in response to her unasked questions, and rub her restless hands between you killer’s hands. She squirms and you sigh and she glares and you smile and when her eye drift closed and her heavy head falls on your shoulder you realize that this, right here, seems to be the only time and place where you seem to fit correctly.

“I hit a bird today,” you whisper in the dark. Killing the fantail had dirtied your hands, and you feel a sudden urge to scrub the raw. You watch shadows flicker over Stella’s face, over her eyelids, her nose, and you suddenly think, what if Stella dies? What if Stella dies? You don’t what to imagine what you might become, who you might become. The fantail was a stranger. But Stella, Stella is… “It was so stupid. I didn’t mean to kill it, I just�"”

Stella’s deep breath rattles in her lungs against your shoulder. If Stella dies…

No, you grind your molars together, blinking away tear and swallowing your panic back. If Stella lives. When Stella like, you think, you swear, under your breath, when Stella lives you won’t ever take a life again, you won’t ever hurt an innocent living thing, you won’t ever kill. Never never never.

Soft fingers close around yours in the darkness, and though you thought she was sleeping, you grip tight like her life �" and your life, because of course they are one and the same �" depends on it.

You will never let go.

(You will, one day.)

You blink back more shame and stare up at the tent ceiling, apologizing for your body, pleading forgiveness for your sins to a God you’re not sure you believe in. It will not be the last time.

----

You are fourteen years old and your name is many thing, but you think it’s most suited when you called B***h.

Because you are a b***h, you are hot and angry and awkward as summer cracks you open to drip out and fry like an egg on the pan. You sizzle, innards exposed to the world, and you want to crawl out of your own skin and tear the world in half.

Your body becomes something half formed, a weird cocoon that is unfamiliar and unwarranted. You eat like a horse and even after all that you feel malnourished, parched, and all forms of hungry in between. Your body is a field, hair springing up on your skin you one knew to be bare, parts of you becoming bigger, growing outwards. You are less of a loud mouthed scrawny kid known for a fast mouth and more the cocky b*****d known for brute force, coiled muscle once hidden in the lankiness of your frame, now prominent. You grow, and people look at you differently. Boys don’t just snare when you smile or show off, they stare. You are no longer ‘cute’ to Ma, you are ‘beautiful’. A voice once chipper and soft is now throaty, like the old women who have smoked a pack a day their whole lives. Your insides refuse to fit beneath your skin because you are constantly shifting about. Growing, metamorphosing, you love it, sometimes.

You hate it, others.

Stella starts drawing when you started growing, and it seems the more time you spend growing the more she draws, sketches and doodles on a notepad that she never lets you look at but always leaves lying around; careless, trustful.

Stella grows too, but the rest of the world is blind to that particular sunspot in your summer.

Although the world may not see Stella, the world does love Stella, you make sure of it. You are the top of the class, but teachers rave about Stella’s artistic ability, praise her manners and obedience, her punctuality. Your mother pecks your cheek every day before you leave for school, but it is Stella that the force to try all her baked goods and soups. And you do not feel jealous for these simple compromises of affection because you feel an almost bellicose insistence for people to see in Stella all that you see. It makes you unbearably frustrated that they don’t see it, continue to remain ignorant simply because Stella lacks you moxie and your chameleon ability to be anyone you want to be (though you know best, there isn’t anyone you’d rather be more than Stella’s Best Friend). You feel sometimes as if you are bearing flag, a torch, for Stella Owens, waving it proudly and shouting “Look at this! This is amazing! Do you see? Do you see how wonderful this is?”

But the world is ignorant, and cruel.

Logan Speight celebrates his fifteenth birthday �" a party at the carnival, with Ferris wheels and cotton candy and bumper carts �" and invites almost everyone in the class, passing out invitations to all his buddies and most of the girls. He saunters over to your desk and winks as he hands you your invitation.

“Limited seats in the cars, sorry Stella.” He says, not even looking at Stella when he speaks, attention rapt in you.

You stare at the envelope in your hands, and notice that Stella has shrunk into herself next to you. She has always liked Logan, always let him borrow pencils from her, and has only ever smiled at him, but now she looks miserable, hurt. Stella may be a scrapper, come away most days dusty from being pushed around by bullies like it’s a routine for how often she tells of bullies, but she’s got nothing to scrap for in this situation. It’s just another person who doesn’t see her, and she’s never been good at fighting that.

“So, coming to my party of not?” Logan asks, squaring his shoulders and he is handsome and he is sweet and you think he’d let you kiss him if you tried.

‘F**k’ is a beautiful word, you have learned, simply because it is the only word in the English language that seems to define how you feel at this point in your life, unsure of everything and angry for it. ‘F**k’ is a word that would get you a mouthful of soap if Ma every heard it, ‘f**k’ is a word you’ve practised under your breath, with trepidation, testing out the bitten F to the exhaled U to the hard edged CK in the back of your throat.

‘F**k’ is one of the many words you use on Logan Speight before grabbing Stella’s arm and hauling her after you.

F**k Logan. F**k them all. You seethe and you swear all the way to your house and it’s not until you let go of Stella and realize she’s laughing her head off that you stop, deflated mid-tantrum.

“See if you ever get invited to a party again.” Stella say between wheezes. “Gosh, the look on his face, I though he was gonna wet himself when you started hollerin’.”

You blink, cowed. “I wasn’t hollerin’.”

“That was a hollerin’ if I’ve ever heard one. We should tell you Ma about it. She’d be so proud she’d probably cry, like mother, like daughter…”

And you are still thinking f**k the world but Stella’s smile is an invisible needle and like a popped balloon, you rebound from you anger, letting her in the front door and rolling your eyes. “Yeah, well, Logan had it coming. Anyone who doesn’t think that Hudson and Owens are a package deal isn’t anyone I want to be hanging around with anyhow.”

She shakes her head like you are something else, and goes up to curl up in the window with her drawing utensils.

When it comes down to it �" and you will never admit this because it is selfish and it is guilty and it is easily the worst part of yourself �" you are almost grateful for the world’s blind eye. You should feel bad for hogging Stella from the rest of the world, but Stella has always passed out smiles like they were candy and now she saves them just for you, and though you should feel stingy or stifled by that fact, you never seem to mind. Because if it is you she chooses to spend her time with, if it is your kitchen window that she perches in with her sketch pad and pencils, if it is you that she’ll shove and play-fight with on hot summer evenings, you will not complain, not one bit.

You will �" if anything- certainly thank your lucky stars for Stella Owens’ own blindness to how absolutely good-for-nothing you really are.

The kitchen is bathed in humid air and sunlight, too hot to be comfortable, so the two of you strip off to your dresses down to you singlets and underwear and sprawl in the afternoon heat, listless. Bowls and bowls of your Ma’s raspberries from the garden, flour and other ingredients alongside, probably for pies and cobblers. Your stomach growls.

“Didn’t you just eat?” Stella asks wryly.

“Shuddup.” You say.

You take up your usual posts on afternoons, Stella drawing, you whittling away at a stick you grabbed in the backyard with your knife.

Stella can create, but you just cut.

The snick of the knife on wood and the sounds of shaving dropping to the ground fill the room, and you watch Stella’s strong hands move over the paper, one hand drawing the other erasing as she goes.

Stella is tall. Logan Speight might need glasses, but even when Stella curls, you see how big she is, or rather, how big she will be one day. The very presence of her is like a tree that grows upwards and onwards, fills doorframes that she lingers in, fits the clothes that drape on her, she’s bigger, in that she’s made of what other people seem to lack in your eyes.

For as weak and delicate as Stella may be physically, there is a boat load of strength in that heart of hers. You tell people �" you tell Stella, really �" that one day she’s going to save the world, and you believe it. You just wish that she could believe it too.

Slender wrists move in quick and calculated motions, and the wrinkle or concentration on her forehead almost makes her look like an old woman. “You could have gone, you know. I wouldn’t have minded.”

And this, you do know. But you also know that anything you do is only half fun when Stella isn’t there with you.

“And miss another afternoon of watching you draw stick figures in the kitchen? Not a chance.”

Stella doesn’t respond, just frowns at her sketchbook, pencil making looping sweeps. It bothers her, that you forgo everyone else, as if choosing Stella is some big sacrifice of companionship. It’s unbearably frustrating, knowing how she feels about herself in regard to you. You feel it’s your job to grab one of those slender wrists and insist ‘just wait Stella you’ll see one day, they’ll all see’, drill it into her head until she believes it.

But you are a B***h. Summer has turned you into something hot and volatile, and you no long know how to speak in words that are not a defence in some offhand way. You converse in jabs and parries, and you feel it would be unwise to lower your weapon now. So you’ll save your confessions of hopes and wishes for moments of darkness, where you can at least pretend she is asleep.

“You gonna show me all those secret sketches you’ve got of me?”

“F**k off,” Stella says coolly.

Laughter bursts past your lips into the open space around you. You shouldn’t have been surprised, Stella taught you that word after all.

She’s talented, naturally, but she’s also shy as all hell when it comes to showing you anything that she’s working on.

“Guess I’ll just have to steal them, then.”

You stand and start to walk over, loving every second of her trying to ignore you and trying to pretend she doesn’t give a care that you’re coming over to pester her. When she hitches her knees up and tucks the sketchbook away, you lean forward, your hands on her thighs, invading her personal space.

She flushes, staring defiantly up. She’s not afraid of you. You think she might be the only kid in this whole world who isn’t.

“’M not showing you.”

“C’mon Stella…”

“Mind your own beeswax!”

When you ruffle the smooth part in her hair, she slaps your hand away, and when you knuckle her scalp the pencils clatter to the floor and she springs up, ready to fight, always ready for a fight. Not that Stella goes looking for trouble �" that has, and always will be, your job �" but rather that she refuses to back down when someone challenges her. She never knows how to walk away. Will she ever learn to walk away?

Will there ever be a fight that Stella Owens will back down from?

(You ask yourself this for years. By the time you know the answer, you will have forgotten the question.)

You make a snatch for the sketchbook, and she tackles you to the floor, snarling like a wildcat. Its play, and the two of you tussle until you’ve got her pinned against the counter, one arm twisted behind her back.

“Say Uncle, Stella!”

“Get off!”

“Not till I see what you’re drawing. Or you say Uncle. What’d you draw, huh, naked boys? Do you draw your perfect fella, chickie?”

She scrambles for purchase, sending silverware and bowls clattering in her effort to gain leverage, and your laughter telegraphs through both your bodies.

Her fist comes up, expected, but it opens at the last second to slap raspberries across you face with a wet splat that causes you to loosen your grip long enough that she can squirm out, fists up in the warm space of the kitchen.

“Oh,” you grapple for the bowl of raspberries, grinning, rolling your shoulders and suddenly appreciating the advantage of your height over Stella, loving how easy it will be to make her pay, “You’re gonna get it.”

The kitchen is a carnage site in the midst of the raspberry war. You pin her to the floor time and time again, but she always seems to know how to get out at the last moment, knows by heart the points of weakness in your body that are not as invincible as you have to come to believe you are. She pokes and pinches and tickles and the two of your pelt raspberries like they’re bullets, building trenches from the dining room table and chairs. The raspberries end up in your hair and up your nose, sweet flavour causing you to lick your lips even as you swear you’re going to strangle that punk for making such a mess.

You press her into the tile, barely covered chest bracketing her nearly naked back as red smears on her skin and in her hair and by the time your Ma come in to scold you both, the kitchen looks like a murder scene straight out of a Detective novel.

Stella ducks her head, apologetic to your mother, scratching at the back of her neck, eager to please and suddenly so innocent. You glare at her, kiss-a*s, and your eye catches on a single raspberry clinging to the sweeping wing of her shoulder blade.

You wait until your Ma leaves the room, and then you lean forward. It feels only natural, and she is such a b***h so you lick the raspberry clear off her shoulder, biting hard at the last second, making sure to leave an imprint of your teeth as she shouts in pain and clocks you over the head with artist’s hands.

The two of you spend hours cleaning the kitchen, and you smell like sweat and feel like the crushed berries are smeared all over the floor. And it’s still somehow the best part of your day, this space and these moments and Stella’s glares. You try not to give that felling too much thought.

You curl up in one bed together that night, because the floor is hard and if you sleep there, you know Stella will join you, bed be damned.

So you jab her in the ribs and she kicks your shins and you fall asleep murmuring insults into the pillows.

When you wake up, you know immediately that something is wrong. Your skin feels taut like a drum, prickly and hot, t-shirt glued to your back with a cold sweat, berry mixed with salt tang. Mouth fuzzy, eyes open, wondering what the hell just happened.

There is something between the V of your thighs and when you sit up, there is pressure, insistent and uncomfortable. You have heard the other girls whisper about this, swap stories about exploring themselves like they’re so much more mature.

You know what this is; it is not unbeknownst to you, just another uncomfortable steeping stone you must clamber past. It is not until you look over your shoulder and realise why.

You look over at Stella, normally a comfort amidst sleepless nights and uncomfortable dreams. But what you feel when you see your best friend’s body, curled around herself, is not comfort. It is yearning, aching, wanting. You are barely aware of how your own body works, how it would work with other bodies, but you know in your gut that you want to put your mouth on Stella Owens. What you would do with that mouth is unclear, terrifying, but you also know �" suddenly and violently; like the crack of thunder signalling torrential summer storms �" that it has everything to do with the soft familiar lines across the expanse of her snowy shoulders, and with the mountains of her spine.

She makes a half formed noise in the back of her throat, mid-sleep, and you are a sudden and loose mess of frantic desires and sickened realizations that you seal your mouth shut, cut off your windpipe, restrict that any circulation that isn’t headed straight South.

This is an assault that your mind cannot control out of terror or self-loathing, for it lies in your blood. It’s not a thing you can physically remove or grapple with. You cannot protect Stella from this, because this is not a bully to beat or scare off, this is not a cold wintery night that you can build a shelter from, this is you.

You are the worst, most dangerous thing for Stella Owens at this moment in time, and you are also the only thing she’s got, the only thing she wants around.

It’s just not the same want that you yourself reciprocate.

Your body has betrayed you. It will not be the last time.

----

You are eighteen years old and your name is B***h Hudson, and you want.

You want Stella Owens. You want her so bad you’ll stitch your mouth closed and sew your hands to your pockets so you don’t do something to scare her away. You want her so bad you’ll fake all the enthusiasm you want for boys, with their hard skin and tough lips. You’ll date boys, dance with boys, kiss boys, make them want you so bad they sigh with it, and you’ll do it all while juggling with the fact you still want your best friend.

You are in a skin that looks good and feels fine, but want turns you inside out, and you feel that life has played a cruel joke on you, making you good looking, smart, charming, but having all of those attributes mean next to nothing where they really count. Where you could use them. And so you careen about, a Catherine Wheel spiralling out of control in night skies; pretty, burning out into smoke and vapour.

Your Ma moves away in the bloom of spring, and it is upon your insistence that you and Stella move in together in order to scrape by, pushing your combined salaries to pay rent in a ramshackle apartment in Wellington. You tell her, after seeing your Ma off, that till the end of the line is where you’ll go, and you mean it, for you see no future that doesn’t have her in it. The two of you rule the world in your unheated palace on the second floor of the apartment building on minimum wage, you are the queens of cheap coffee and left-overs, of huddling under blankets for warmth, propped up on your throne of being somebodies to each other in a world where everybody thinks you’re nobodies.

The apartment is something that is yours, you make it so. Tacking up your favourite comics on the walls, clothes lines in the kitchen, toothbrushes in a mug by the sink. You tiny shower is barely enough to place a single foot in. You fill a plastic milk crate with worn and torn books, spend your daily wages every other Friday just to add to your collection. You spend more frigid nights reading through your library instead of going out dancing to pass time, and you’re pretty sure you know every book in the library front to back by this point, but it is yours and Stella’s, and being able to call it something not only yours, but ours makes you almost sick with how satisfying it feels.

Work is something you can throw yourself into in the midst of your want, long hours standing behind a coffee machine in a city with grey skies and nameless customers who are already worn thin. The physical side wears you out, so you can come home to Stella and not worry that you’re to amped up to resist temptation. You come home dirty, sweaty, and smelling of coffee.

It’s nearly winter, so Stella works late afternoons when the sun surfaces, and is always home to greet you in the evening, her breath faltering but her eyes bright whenever they settle on you.

You come home one day with a burn along your forearm, barely anything save for how it can’t seem to stop seeping. You got foolish, you hand slipped, spent one too many minutes pondering over daydreams involving a creamy skinned girl in a dark room.

“What’d you do now?” She rises, a copy of An Interview with a Vampire falling with a thud to the gritty tile of your tiny kitchen, she directs you in soft footfalls to the counter and grabs your arm, exasperated.

“This is going to need cleaning.” She says after barely a moment’s inspection.

“Good thing you like to care for me so much.” You grin around a mouthful of exhaustion.

You don’t have two extra dollars to rub together but she take your one bottle of alcohol regardless, giving you a swig for good measure before grabbing the antiseptic and a few swabs and setting to work cleaning and patching. Hissing through your teeth, you laugh.

The pain feels good. Better than most things you feel these days.

“Make yourself useful.” She picks up the book from the floor and pushes it into your unwounded hand. “Since you made me lose my spot. Page three hundred and four.”

There is no arguing when Stella is playing nurse, and you set about the ritual of reading, voice pitched low so the landlord won’t issue a noise complaint. Stella often reads aloud when you patch her wounds, but where she’s got the love for words, you’ve got the voice, weaving the tale with melody and charm to boot.

But there’s no bluster to put on in this cramped kitchen, not a single soul you’ll be able to charm, so you hold one arm out as she scrubs away all the dirt and coffee, wincing on commas and periods, but managing to keep your voice steady as your read. Stella hates it when you mess up the good parts. You keep your voice gentle, and it feels somehow, like a story you’ve read before.

“It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there.”

You glance away momentarily, Stella’s fingers smoothing bandages over your skin. She pats you soundly, and the sight of her removing you from her hands hurts to watch, so you glance back to the page.

“And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face, his body, his proximity.”

Stella has patched you up with steady hands, same as always. Her hands reach upwards once she’s finished, smoothing out you hair, fingers coming away softly. It’s a comforting gesture, no different than when she bumps your shoulder as you walk down the street together, or fold her knees to touch yours when you sleep front to front.

And you want to do more than envision her.

“You’re filthy,” she says with humour, and filthy your are, the word ‘SINNER’ scratched out on your skin in angry red letters like fresh cuts, you are filthy in how desire thwarts common decency and sense time and time again, filthy in how you want to wreak Stella, worship and revere and absolutely wreak her.

“But I still call first shower,” Stella quips, turning and lifting her shirt over her head, sight of bare skin and black lace smacking your breath from your lungs.

You have considered before, that you could get used to a lifetime of this. One room, one shower, one bed. This; coming home to Stella each evening, bringing home food, ruling your throne and not giving a singular s**t about anyone else in the goddamn world. This; Stella cleaning you wounds and you watching her back, she the queen, you the lion-hearted knight.

But you don’t think you’ll be able to take another night of Stella like this; nearly naked and unaware of how you’d punch a thousand Andrew Peters, shoot down a thousand fantails, wreck thousands of kitchens, just to have her want you back.

Because, you think, this whole thing wouldn’t be wrong, if she wanted it too. It wouldn’t. You’re eighteen and God no longer exists to a girl of your world experience, but you don’t think any righteous God would condemn something that you should, would feel so perfect to you.

It wouldn’t be wrong if Stella wanted it to, because Stella is good and Stella only ever wants for things that are good. But she doesn’t and it isn’t. You are a sinner and you are going to hell for the way you watch the slant of her flanks as she strips down, the notches of her hips above the skirts that have always fit too loose. No, you are not going to hell. This is hell, you arrived long before you even realized where you were.

An Interview with the Vampire slaps to the tile for a second time. When you lift it, staring at anything but the angles of Stella, you notice one of her pencilled notations, a circling around one particular sentence amongst dog eared pages and a cracked spine.

“Every moment must first be known and then savoured.”

“Tash, you alright? You look real pale… how much pain are you in?” Stella trusts you more than anyone, but she should be running.

You, you should be running.

You have seen her naked before. You have seen Stella Owens naked almost naked every week for your whole life, it feels. There is no shame between the two of you, and why should there be?

But every time there was nakedness, it was a wall away from your Ma, or her Ma, or in the changing room amidst countless other girls your age. You were never alone like this, Stella looking at you, confused, mouth open on the end of her question.

You could once depend on a world where you fit in a bed with Stella Owens, where the world and its trouble would not be small enough to fit in there with the two of you but the troubles find themselves in your bed anyway, and you have learned by now that two’s company, but three’s a crowd.

You think about how this bed would creak with your bodies, how her skin would feel against yours, how she would taste on your mouth, lust shining in overblown pupils and heat of pulse.

You can’t do this. It hits you like a sucker punch.

You are not going to be able to live a life like this, always inches away from temptation, without acting on impulse, self-control has never been your strength. You cannot protect Stella when all you want to do is to ruin her.

So you choose, you force yourself, to box yourself away and you protect her in the best way you can.

“Need another drink.” You grab your coat, and swing out of the apartment feeling drunk on heat, even in the cool night air.

And though she stays behind, Stella follows you into the street, dogging your shadow, an invisible thing always just out of reach. You’ll never be rid of her, a drug that pumps through your veins, think smoke that clings to your skin. She lives and blossoms in your heart like a bruise, hurting more and more each time you touch it,

But Stella is not something you are allowed to touch, not in the ways that matter most.

You need to get rid of her, shed this childish fantasy of a girl who wants another girl, because if there’s anything this world has taught you, fantasies are for fools, and happy endings were never yours to keep in the first place.

(Happy endings are just one of many things that you will find were never yours, you will know this soon enough.)

You are Tasha Hudson and you are beautiful and you know how to make toes curl with a flash of your smile. You couldn’t give a s**t about any of the fellas in the random bar you walk into, but you still speak soft and thank those who hold your door, because you are a classy lady, because Stella would think badly of you if you were anything but.

She’s with you, even in the times you least want her to be.

You are the punchline to a joke. A chick walks into a bar looking for a fella but hungry for her best friend.

So you let a guy f**k you on a tiny creaky mattress until he’s moaning your name and sweating on the sheets, wet slap of skin making you shiver with revulsion at yourself. He’s absolutely built, a real looker, and you f**k him despite the fact you’ve never once done this before, never once felt inclined. You roll your head into his shoulder as you snap your hips and feel him shudder, and if you keep both your eyes closed you can imagine snowy skin across a softer build. You f**k a guy and you treat him so good, tell him you’re gonna make it so good, that he’ll never need anyone else, never need another but you.

You hope to God that his name happens to be Steve or James; something like that.

When you come it’s with cheeks flushed, your lipstick smeared over his collar like blood, and something breaking in your chest, desperate and futile and almost hopeful that this will be enough to fix everything. You clench around him and you listen as his heart flutters against the cage of your sternum and you wait to see if your beats will synchronize. You are hardly surprised, resigned, to find they do not: the wrong cadence, the wrong notes, the wrong songbird.

You walk home smelling like someone else’s body, you are cocky and braggy and you are everything she needs you to be and when she smiles, rolls her eyes, say, “Yeah, whatever, go wash up you letch” you think this is simultaneously the worst thing you have ever done for you, but also the best for her.

You marry the words. ‘Good for Stella’ and ‘Self Destruction’ until they are one and the same thing and you tell yourself that as long as Stella is happy, the blows you put in your own body will not matter.

It will not be the last time.

----

You are twenty five years old, your name id Nomad Tasha Hudson and you are in love with violence.

You are in love with violence, and you like that you can say that because violence is many things. The dictionary defines violence as strength of emotion, or an unpleasant or destructive natural force, but it is so much more than that to you. Violence is the colour of your lipstick, bright and marking up your victim’s necks, violence is tight fitting new dress that highlights your curves and violence is your best cocky smile. Violence is a girl born into this world fighting fighting fighting. You crave violence like clean air and cold water because it is instantaneous gratification, settles the itch of want in your stomach, keeping it at bay just a little longer.

And you love violence most because no matter how much and how fast you run it never seems to leave you. You are sure in this fact, the same way you are sure your life is marked in crimsons and pinks and burgundies, bursting like fireworks on the fourth of July.

Violence is not a thing you can physically be, but it is within itself something that you love.

The day Stella had suggested the two of you move countries was a blessing in disguise. She’s been so excited, jittery and driven, finally a cause she could push herself to rise to. And you had agreed on the conditions of having job to placate her. You are just a couple of lanky kids from Wellington, living off of scraps and hospo wages. You are not gonna be good in a whole new world, and that was just fine with you.

Stella hadn’t found anything with her line of work. You found something and was called to start as soon as seven am two weeks from that day.

Stella had taken you out and gotten you drunk in celebration. You pretend to be far too gone from Vodka and she pretended to be pleased as all get out that you were going off to a different country. It was a brilliant performance on both your parts, pretend pride and joyfulness, but when Stella’s shoulders quietly shook beside you in bed that night, you damn near called back the offer and insisted that there must have been some mistake, you couldn’t go, you could never go, you didn’t belong in a different country, you weren’t a strong person for that, you weren’t a fighter, you have never been a fighter…

Women like Stella, they are fighters. You are just a loose cannon, always have been. A weapon, cocked pistol just waiting for the trigger to be pressed.

You are not a fighter, but Australia is handing you an opportunity, pointing you in some direction and telling you to march, that is an order girl. So you do it.

Moving is without a doubt the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Yet now that you are here, you love the violence that comes with a fresh start, because it give you purpose. Violence puts a spark in your eye and spring in your step. Violence makes you work hard so you are worn out enough to sleep at night and violence makes sure you work hard enough to put together a balanced meal to eat and violence makes you take enough pride to make sure you clothes are always clean.

And you can get behind this violence because it is pushing you to be productive, good. Working hard, pushing the boundaries to move up the food chain. If you are a weapon, at least you can destroy something that deserves to be destroyed, and forcing your way to the top. The alternative is your worst nightmare, so you cling to violence like it’s your raft, adrift in an ocean of blood.

You’d almost consider it peaceful, if you weren’t so homesick.

Stella writes you emails, they pour in to your work like the rest of the packages other workmates receive, but in double the quantity, and triple the length. You picture it in your head; play out the fantasy in your weakest of moments, after your roommate has drifted off to sleep, once you’ve taken your managers eye off for the day. You imagine Stella doing nothing but sitting at the cramped kitchen table writing you email after email on her laptop, laughing when she writes in a jibe at you, frowning when she signs off, always reluctant, seemingly interrupted by having to go to work, or needing sleep, never voluntarily saying goodbye. You barely have the time to write back with all the running into the ground that you do to yourself, short notes here and there.

You miss her like hell, but missing Stella is not the same as Stella missing you, and for that reason, you belong here. You belong in a new place, this new world. When you move to another city, higher in the ranks, you will run off with a smile plastered on your face.

You are not an innocent lamb being led to the slaughter, but a pig. A selfish and greedy pig, who wants more than she has, who shouldn’t want yet wants endlessly, needlessly, tirelessly.

You plan like hell to get back to Stella, or die trying. Though you believe you belong out here in this new world, you have no desire to die here. You may be in love with violence, the act of unhinged life and desire and sudden action, but underneath that is your want. And what you want is a kid from Paraparaumu with soft hand and delicate skin; as long as she’s alive, then so will you be, til the end til the end til the end.

If you do die �" and you do consider it, dream through crystal balls that predict every bloody outcome you may have �" you can only hope that if it happens (when it happens) that it will be quick. For you have dealt with drawn out death, and you’re not particularly a fan. As resilient and suborn as you are, you are only so strong.

Besides, you do not see poetry in dying as you have been living for the past six years, waking up one day and wanting your best friend; you know by now that there is no heroism in drawn out suffering.

Months later you will be lying in a bed. Your mouth will be like sandpaper and your eyes will be burning. A man will lean over and ask you what you know of pain. Do you like pain, Tasha Hudson? Are you experienced with it? Can you bear it? You will keep trying to leave him, tell him that there are worse things than this. Worse pains, worse aches, worse tortures. You swear to God and breathe violence at him like your mouthy best friend taught you to. The b*****d can carve you down to your base structure all he wants, but he won’t get anything from you. Nothing. You’ll fight. You will fight. You won’t let him ever break you.

Each time you walk away, your friends call you a hero for you suffering. They will shake your hand and commend you on your bravery. They will laude you as a true fighter.

That is all a lie, of course. All it took was five minutes away from that bed before you screamed and sobbed for him to take you back.

It will not be the last time.

----

You are twenty six years old and you are a dead woman walking.

Stella finds you in a run-down house, an assemblage of needle prick pain and you’re sure you are dead when she kneels over you, everything unfamiliar but the green of her eyes and the kindness of her mouth. She collects you to her like a rag doll, like the sum of your parts is light, meaningless, holds no weight to her. She whispers about how she heard the track you went down, the drugs, the abuse. But now she’s here. She found you.

You ache to touch her, sweep your hands over the part in her hair and the defined angle of her jaw but this is not the place. So you wake yourself up, collect your few personal belongings and swap affection for action and you don’t let anyone stand in the way as a threat to the women who looks like she can more than handle her own now.

You are back at Stella Owens side, but everything is wrong, it is all wrong.

The return to her house drops you into a fairy tale where you are the forgotten plot device, some fucked up glass slipper or half bitten apple left behind and not mentioned again. You are the afterword to the happy ending, and you stumble back into Stella’s life with full knowledge that you don’t belong there.

Once upon a time simply being with Stella would have been enough to fix you, but the woman that rescues you from the crack den �" for she is a woman, no longer a girl �" is not your best friend. She moves with confidence and compassion, only now people listen in a way they never did before. She talks smack like your Stella and she is gentle like your Stella and she is beautiful like your Stella, but no longer in a way that belongs solely to you.

“So how should I thank my White Knight?” You say softly, proud as punch and feeling like your rib cage is collapsing.

You had always been able to say you belonged at Stella’s side, and nowhere else, because she had always needed you and that was more than fine by you.

But now, she was a Grown Up. Now, there’s Leo Mather.

He’s got a bright laugh and a sharp eye and could charm all the boys as she could shoot them. His lips were full and he was beautiful and if you were a man you would probably find an excuse to fight him.

Stella looks at him like he’s the only solid thing in a world of ghosts.

As it is, you cannot bring yourself to hate him because you know that he �" like you �" saw Stella and loved Stella before anyone else did. Leo Mather is the fella you made your life’s mission to find for your best friend. They deserve each other, and you could not be happier or sadder about that fact.

You feel the swell of a black hole in your chest as you wonder, now that she has grown, so much more noticeable in a world that wants nothing but trouble, how are you supposed to protect her now?

“I’m following her,” you say, to no one’s surprise. Because you may not be able to protect her entirely, but you’re starting to get that running away from her most often works in the opposite of your favour. And after all, she wants so bad to see you better. You can’t do anything but listen to what she wants of you.

You will not tell her that you thought of leaving. You will not tell her that there is an ache in your gut for the muggy slummy streets of Wellington, for weak wrists where there is now strength, for an artist where there is now a business women. You stay, because when you were six years old you carried a bleeding girl off the playground and you don’t think you ever really stopped carrying her.

Even when she didn’t need you anymore.

You had lost her briefly and it almost killed you.

(You stay because the worst thing to ever happen to you wouldn’t happen to you; it would happen to her.)

You’d promised her once in a darkened room that you would never let her go. She’d have to be the one to do that.

That promise will crop up time and time again, when you sleep a room away, when you socialise with her friends, when you stand up for her so she can walk forward without trouble. You won’t let go, can’t.

It will not be until you are dangling by a thread of your life, a sea a white ahead that you will realize that she’d never promised it back.

It’s hard to say why you fall. Maybe she wasn’t quick enough to see, maybe you did let go in the end. You fall down the rabbit hole, and all you can think is who’s going to look after her now, who’s gonna make sure she’s okay, is she going to be okay?

Your fate rushes up to meet you, and you let it tear you apart, shattering you like glass. And it will, it will be the last time.

The last thing you ever did was hurt her.

And all you can think is thank God it’s me. Thank God it’s me, thank f*****g God it’s me and not you.

But you will not hate her for it, not as long as you li---

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You have died. You think. You’re no longer sure.

There is a weird in between state, you think you have died but your heart is pounding and you muscle are straining and you know you are feeling things. There is pressure all around, at the front of your skull, in the back of your mouth, moulding you like clay, making you into something new.

Years, decades may pass as they chip away who you were away. You were once the whittler but now you are the whittled, a barren branch slowly stripped of itself, carved into an unknown identity. They try different methods, invent new technologies, and you think new sciences are created to help you recover all that you were, in the times they take you in and out of your box of a room within the hospital. Not only are you tossed into a fire, but a freezer, time and time again.

You resist it, everything they do, for a while. You hold on to violence, to Tasha Violet Hudson, to a face with green eyes, curly hair and a smile like stars, to memory.

But you have long learned that half the battles you have and will fight were never meant to be won.

Like clay, there’s no substance in you, so all it takes is the right amount of pressure to take what you hold dear, they say. The right amount of voltage, they say. The right amount of agonizing pain, you know.

You are a horror story, a shell carved from abuse and drugs, made of parts that Do. Not. Fit. There are feelings, sensation at the tips of your fingers just out of reach. There are sounds (pencil on paper), tastes (raspberries) that you think you might keep to yourself, for enjoyment, and peace, but they are not yours. You are told as such.

Natasha Violet Hudson.

But what is mine? You ask. Is anything mine?

Tasha Hudson.

(It will not be until the fourth month they hold you and drown you that you stop asking for something that isn’t yours.)

Tasha

(It will not be until the sixth month in the rehabilitation clinic that you realise you never deserved it anyway.)

----

After years in rehab, you are reborn a whole new person. Any parts of you that might’ve spoken of the old you have been washed away. You start again, simply because living seems to be the only thing that does feel familiar to you.

Fine work, you doctors say to themselves, like you’re their prize f*****g stallion. The drug addict is now a fully functional human again. Fine work indeed.

But how much of yourself was really recovered. You were left in ruin by drugs and therapy. How are you supposed to get better locked in an asylum? The dreams of green eyes have stopped and at least now you truly go by the name Natasha but what was the cost?

You are standing on a side road, all things around you carrying on. There are people going about their days with no concern but you only have eyes for the woman who is staring back at you, in awe, in horror.

“Tasha?”

And you feel, in this moment, that you are looking down at a girl and this girl is sad and in your gut you know you should go to her.

But ‘Tasha’ is a made up word, a fragment you do not recognise anymore, a part of a horrid past.

“I’m not Tasha.”

She looks up at you again, that girl, eyes green as spring field and fond memories from lifetimes ago start stirring. Her unwillingness to come to you, the surrender of your unrecognition is an image that sits in your mind like a picture frame hung askew on a wall; the girl should be fighting.

She’s supposed to always be fighting.

You can’t recall ever wanting to protect a single thing in your life, not even your own skin, but right now you want to tell this girl to fight, or fight for her, slaughter anyone who tells you different.  For the first time in three years, you are feeling something.

Returning to the therapist feels like returning to the dog house. You are not living, and you are going to get punished for it.

“But I knew her.” You tell your doctor, sadness on your tongue. But he shuts you up with recovery jargon and tells you to move on from your past.

But you knew her.

----

You don’t know who you are anymore. All you know is that you are bleeding, everywhere. Memory leaks out of your orifices. You are taking back your life. You are more liquid than woman, and no matter how many layers you put on yourself you are freezing.

You dream again of fantails and pebbles and darkened rooms full of dying bodies. You wake up more exhausted than you have ever felt. If this is living, then you kind of want to stop. No one wants to hear a broken record glitch and malfunction on repeat. No one wants a loaded gun that won’t shoot.

No one wants a good for nothing kids from Paraparaumu with no name and no face.

She catches you again eventually.

(You let her.)

On the top of a building that could be any nameless place on the Earth, where you are chasing your own picture show of your life, trying to remember the before. You sit on the edge of the building, feet dangling over a busy street. This isn’t the same Wellington. It moved on, without you.

As did everything else.

“What’re you doin’ Tasha?”

Tasha. That’s an old name. You bite the inside of your cheek until the skin breaks like it’ll provide the answer.

Truth be told, you don’t even know what you are doing here, for the simple fact that there is no one pulling you strings, to use you and discard you.

“The fall wouldn’t kill me.” You say flatly, ignoring her question and watching a pollution haze over a city you can’t even recognize from memory. “Don’t worry back me swan diving.”

She stands wordless, waiting, keeping distance.

Why is she here, when you have nothing to offer but a pocket of sobriety tokens and every promise single promise that you broke? What could she possibly have to gain from you other than revenge, surely revenge, for the best friend that you let almost be killed?

The lines of her body are familiar and you know she is a threat to your sobriety, but that is alongside that is the notion that that body once lifted you out of hell, brought you to sunlight.

You don’t care about her, but you think that you would miss her, this stranger with earnest eyes and a gentle voice. You don’t care, but the idea of her gone leaves you feeling oddly hollow, like the absence of a limb. But leaving her would also render you out of place forever, with no connection to any sense of who you might’ve been, of who you could’ve once been.

Who you might be now.

“How’d you find this place?” She asks, clambering out onto the stoop and sitting next to you. “We once watched fireworks out here while it was raining, you remember? I think I was thirteen.”

You close your eyes and feel rain soaking you through, see lights bursting up above, a small child whooping beside you. There is another sensation, a subtle tug in your gut, deeper than your nerves and instinct, unsettling. You’re too tires to question what it means.

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

She doesn’t answer you. Your head hurts. The two of you watch a city neither of you seem to recognize. Twelve feet of five years between bodies that used to sleep back to back in your bedroom.

“It’s funny. Because I just want to go home,” you look up at her, bitterness in your mouth, “I don’t have a home, do I?”

(You do. You always have. It’s just that no one taught you that your home could be girls with green eyes instead of buildings with bricks.)

“No Tasha. You don’t.” A name that isn’t yours is offered to you like a gift, and you turn away from it. You wish you had the will to fight her, the will to fight yourself, but exhaustion leaves you barren of inclination to act, so you sit.

“We could find you a new one,” she says after a moment, voice almost drowned out by the city. “How does that sound?”

She offers a hand to you, and you blink at it, recalling a playground and bloody elbows and having to look down to see the girl who’d picked a fight with the biggest bully in school.

Something says you were not supposed to let go in the first place. You decline the hand, but follow here regardless, because this women seems to make up more of who you are, who you were, than you ever did. You make yourself as small as possible, bite back shivers and hunger pangs in case she changes her mind and decided you aren’t worth saving after all.

Stella Owens �" who has more important messes to clean up that scattered mess of your mind �" never once lets you drop back and become her shadow.

----

You are thirty years old and your name is once again Tasha Hudson (or so they keep telling you).

They tell you the slate is clean. That you can start fresh, take new first steps and new first everything. It’s not a concept you seem to understand, ‘first’, because you feel almost a hundred years old and your ‘firsts’ were used up in a smattering of years measured by how many fights you didn’t want to get into but did anyhow.

Your new therapist tells you have a new start. But the only ‘start’ you have ever known is the beginning of a race across the school ground playground, the commencement of a work shift, a mission. You do not know ‘start’ without direction.

So you stay with Stella. Because you know in your bones that the rest of the world with not believe in this so called fresh start for Tasha Hudson. You’re not sure you believe it either.

Time was once meaningless to you but now you are aware of it constantly; minutes, days and hours and months since you remembered yourself, remembered other people. It’s all fragments that you can’t make sense of, shards of glass that you are trying to put together with cut and stinging fingers.

Keeping track of time from day one of Fresh Start is what keeps you aware, able to discern one day to the next. You used to count is pills and bottles. Now you count the things you can recognize with perfect clarity, a small but growing pile.

----

You are thirty and five month and three days the first time you help save a life. You are leaving a session with your therapist at the hospital and you see a women wandering looking helpless. Her skin is shining and raw with track marks, and she thanks you so profusely for getting her inside that you spend the night in the bathroom, starting at your face in the mirror and wondering why nothing stares back, why you can’t see what the woman saw.

Sometimes you feel like you are bleeding openly, wounds on display for a critical world to scrutinize. You see red everywhere, on your hand when you open your eyes in the dark (nightmares are more frequent than not), in the shock of hair that is present in every group session (Kaitlyn is the only one who doesn’t go easy on you, you hope she knows how much you appreciate that). You find it difficult to reconcile the time you have wasted that you now have a chance to make up for it, even more pressure on making it up because you know they’re watching you. You are an ex-addict now, they tell you, and they help you in ways they can. The only one who doesn’t overtly offer to help is Stella, who always has your back, just as you have hers, but doesn’t seem frantically determined to make you fit as everyone else is. She answers your questions and corrects your assumptions and she’ll even quip back at your sarcasm, much to everyone else’s surprise. Stella irks and comforts you in all the ways that count, despite that you’re not quite sure why or how they could, but you gradually change your time meter from therapist sessions to things Stella does, or says.

The first time you startle a laugh out of her is the best day of that entire week.

Still, the nightmares continue, your own panic attacks pulling you up from the dredges of much needed sleep. Night time pulls a cloak over your eyes that feels a lot like a locked hatch over the outside world, and despite being in top physical condition you exist on a schedule of catnaps on Stella’s couch that progress to catnaps in Stella’s bed. You think if she minds, she’ll say something, and to the pleasure of the bizarre tug in your gut, she never does.

You start doing Jigsaw puzzles. Your therapist says they are relaxing, and you’re gradually discovering that he is right about most things. You enjoy the soft click of a piece fitting into place, and it gives you something to do other than sleeping. You started small at first, but insomnia is a large beast to keep at bay, and your therapist only had a few hundred piece ones in his office. Your request for more puzzles is acquitted by your support group, who all thought it would be funny to put together to order nearly fifty puzzle, all somehow related to Marvel comics and cartoons.

The group is full of asses, but they have their moments.

You can’t sleep. This is not new.

“How many this time?”

Stella pads out to join you from her room, hair mussed, some innate sense dragging her from sleep so she can stick close to you. You once believe that wherever she goes, you follow, but you are starting to learn that most things involving you and Stella tend to work both ways. This is not new either.

“Fifteen hundred.” Click. Click. Rotate. Click.

“Can I join you?”

You shrug. Rotate. Rotate. Click. Rotate. “It’s a free country.”

You win a chuckle with that, consider it today’s victory, much more so than other battle fought and won.

She crosses her legs on the other side of the table, and if her ankles brush yours, neither of you mentions it. She watches you, careful, always so careful. You used to be the one afraid of breaking her. You wish the tables hadn’t turned so violently.

You wish you could take care of each other. That sits on your shoulders heavy.

The sketchpad appears from out of nowhere. One minute Stella is watching you finish of the leftmost corner, the next she is drawing, pencil sweeping over the paper. It’s the only thing that could possibly make you look away from the puzzle itself.

But you say nothing.

You work on the puzzle, the two of you forming a symphony of rotations and clicks and scratch of pencil on paper. You don’t ask what she’s drawing, but you are more than aware of the way of her eyes flick over to you every few minutes.

Curiosity gets the best of you, and when you put the final most piece into place, you look up.

“Can I see?” You ask.

Stella freezes, and if you compare what memories you have side by side, you know that she will say no, because Stella is honest but she’s not open. If she was, she isn’t anymore.

But when she silently slips the sketchbook over the table, you think that maybe some things really have changed.

It is a singular sketch of a woman, resembling your body and form. A woman comprised of soft lines, dark shading, jagged curls settling around a face. She looks harsh. The space below her brow is void, soft impressions that could closed, or looking down. It’s impossible to tell what this woman looks like, what she’s feeling, who she is.

“I don’t have a face.”

Stella shrugs. “Kind of hard to capture unless you’re looking right back at me, Tasha. And you have a bit of a habit of not doing that.”

You know this. You dodge her gaze like a game of tag, always darting away, finding a distraction just north or south of her gaze. You’re so terrified of what you might see reflected in her eyes. Stella’s got your whole life locked behind her lips and you see it every time you look at her, and you know if you asked, she’d give it all to you, every detail and finer memory that you’re too cowardly to seek for yourself.

So when you push the sketchbook back into her unsuspecting hands, it’s almost a plea. You want Stella to build you up, create something out of your own self-destruction that was promised from the day you sat in a kitchen and whittled on a stick because you yourself were never good at creating. You want her to give you a face that is recognizable beyond this maw of violence that has become all you know about yourself.

You silently place your hands in your lap, force your eyes up.

Looking at her is immediately the most exhausting thing you have done in months. You have dealt with mistrust and suspicion, with outright stares and nervous glances, and they have been meaningless in the face of your acceptance: you deserve all of it and more. But Stella looks at you with something akin to fondness, a concept that you have no explanation for because you did nothing to make her look at you like that in the first place. Her trust is unsettling, but you bare your gaze, stare at her as if the answers to all questions are pouring from her charcoal pencil to paper.

You remember that her hand used to be dwarfed by the pencil, that the sketchpad once upon a time covered her entire lap instead of one thigh. You remember these details, not so much cold microbursts knocking you over as they are flashes of sunlight, and you feel one of the icicles in the cave of your chest melt down and fall, shattering in a puddle of warmth.

When she returns the sketch to you, you’re almost disappointed at the results the second time around. You don’t mean to be. It’s just… “What the hell is that?”

“That’s you.” Stella answers.

“Okay, sure, but what the hell is that?” You point at the drawing around the muddled corners of your mouth. This is not your face, not a chance in the world.

“You were frowning at first. But then you smiled, towards the end, so I changed it.” She says, wryly. “Dunno what you found so amusing.”

You stare down, cradling the sketchpad in your hands. The upward turned corners of your mouth reveal straight white teeth, the smile travelling towards your eyes and it is not a face you know, but it is one she knows.

The notion that you were once a person who smiled is something that Stella gave to you, knowingly or unknowingly and when you look at her again, the unexplained need hitches a little bit higher in your chest, kicking you just beneath the heart.

“You let me know when you want me to work on the rest.” Stella offers gently, walking to her room and closing the door.

You stare once more at the paper, grey lips curved. It is not you. But it is a start.

----

You are thirty years and five months and ten days.

You allow Stella Owens to rebuild you, sew back together your pieces with lead and a spiral notebook, night after night. You piece together a puzzle, and she pieces back together Tasha Hudson. You have long stopped trusting yourself to get the job done, and so it’s easier to let Stella sit down, to look right at her, and let her do the stitching.

You live each day, sometimes it’s hard, during the day, never alone, but you are still hurting with the weight of it. But for all that hurt you are thankfully allowed the tranquillity of late nights with puzzles, and the woman from your past.

The longer you look on Stella, the more you recall of who you once were. She gives you one part of yourself each time, and with that part comes a memory. You don’t bring up these memories, you don’t know how. Voicing things like these to Stella might clue her in, get her excited, hopeful in you, and you’ve let her down far too much to even attempt it again.

The sight of your eyebrows, drawn together in the middle, wrinkle in the joint, comes with the recollection of cussing out Logan Speight in front of a classroom, stalking out with Stella’s hand in yours. Your nose reminds you of how you Ma smelled, apples and flour. The stubborn set of your jaw recalls the first time you punched a boy in the face, mouthing off to Andrew Peters like you weren’t half his size. When Stella draws your shoulders, you remember cocking your head back and knocking a bird from the skies. When Stella draws the crease of your elbows, you remember barrelling into her bedroom, sick with yourself. Your hands remind you of darkness, of staring at a ceiling and gripping those belonging to a girl, praying for forgiveness and promising never to harm again.

Stella finishes your mouth, and you remember licking raspberry off a shoulder and waking up so confused you couldn’t see straight.

Night by night the two of you play Scheherazade, weaving one thousand and one tales into a likeness that bears your name.

You don’t take about the memories you retain, the ways in which they hurt, but Stella is either careful not to add tears to the drawing, or she simply does not notice them.

As you remember, you think about a lot of things. You think about violence, you think about things that are broken. You think about the want in your gut, you think of all the people you defied to get to this place here, across from the smallest girl inside the largest hero. When Stella finishes each time, the two of you convene for breakfast at three, four, sometimes five am, and you sleep like a rock on  your respective side of the bed and try not to wonder if this is a life you could continue to live it.

----

You are thirty years old and six months and seventeen days when the final product is passed over to you, Stella looking almost nervous as she does.

The person who stares off the page at you almost looks peaceful. She has scars, but underneath those scars is a face you somehow recognize. Your eyes are clear, shadows clouding underneath, a product of the nightmares. You aren’t smiling in this particular drawing, but something about the set of your bottom lip speaks of serenity, washing over your heart like ocean waters over stone, smoothing you out. You are a person drawn up of experiences, of thought and emotions, no longer bottles and pills.

This face is your, and yours alone.

You should say something, you have to say something. She needs to know about the way you pulse is racing and you throat is tightening. How you want to run at her and away from her all at once.

Stella may know and protect you better than anyone, but you have never been one for words and though you speak soft your heart has only ever been loud, passion making a racket in the cage of your chest for too long. You’re not sure what would come out if you were to try and speak up.

You don’t know how to thank her. You will never know. But when you look up at her, smiling with your whole body, you think Stella gets the idea anyway.

So you start piecing together Stella in turn.

You are no artist yourself, but you have always enjoyed the bird’s eye view, so you watch Stella through you retina crosshairs and analyse her whenever you get the chance, in between and during the days, in the late night hours when she joins you to draw, in the rush out the door to save the world.

She get raspberry jam to stock the fridge. You know it’s for you because she’s got a well-used jar of grape as well. But the raspberry is always there, and she always replenishes just before it run out. Stella exists on small gestures of kindness that are more familiar to you that anything else in your current world. Her hair always sticks up on one side first thing in the morning after she wakes up. She always wears socks on the kitchen tile, and you remember that her feet were always perpetually cold from poor circulation, and apparently still are. Stella used to love bananas but she won’t go near them in the midst of the fruit bowl. She adds sugar to everything she possibly can. Except for coffee, which she keeps strong. You match memories to motor function, notices that she still curls up when she draws, even though her limbs are long and actually sprawl. She still defends the helpless. People, everyone, gravitates towards her, and they listen to her. She still pinks with embarrassment when Sam and Kaitlyn tease her, but she’s never without a backhand retort to shut them down just as quickly.

She makes room for you in her life, in this world, includes you with a pointedness that lets you know you are welcome. She keeps her space, and you are always the first to approach, but as the weeks drag on you find you want her to break that agreement, you wish for the invasion of your space more than ever before, but Stella’s not giving unless you ask her to.

You worry you won’t ever get the words out.

----

You are thirty years old and eight months old when you finally get it out.

It’s three am, and you’re sitting at the kitchen table with your latest puzzle. Stella walks by you, the socks on her feet silent over the tile, and you bite your cheek to hide your smile; she’d been asleep all of ten minutes ago. The naked skin of her shoulders under the tank singlet would usually silence you entirely, but in the haze of three am and not having slept in a solid twenty three hours or so, it’s less of a shock to your system and more of a comfort, that she feels this relaxes around you.

“Another nightmare?” She asks gently, opening the fridge door.

You wince at the cold, nodding, and she closes it with a sharp snap. She doesn’t ask, and you don’t answer. Instead, she removes the loaf of Tip Top bread with practised movements, putting two slices in the toaster and getting out the jam, same as usual. The silence settles over the two of you like a blanket, and you shift a few other of the pieces around; click, click, rotate, click, and listen to Stella puttering around the kitchen, drying the last few dishes in the sink. She takes the toast out lazily, practised routine of unscrewing the jar, and it’s as she swirls the knife around the jar, that you see it.

The cloister of freckles on the jut of her shoulder blade.

One minute you’re holding back a yawn, bleary eyed and bending, and the next your yawn is frozen in your mouth, and you are pulled in two directions: want driving you forward, caution making you stay.

Her back is to you, and she’s smearing a piece of toast red with raspberry and you think this is a scene you’ve lived before; second verse, same as the first.

For you don’t know what to call the situation in your gut, looking at Stella. Your vocabulary and sense of self are comprised of two different centuries, and most of the time, you’re still not sure which one you’re living in, you yourself are missing piece, you might never be complete. There isn’t a name to describe it quite yet on your tongue, because you don’t know what the thing is in the first place.

You were never going to say anything. You couldn’t ever say anything. But the year is 2015. You have survived your own wars, death itself. You overcame the loss of your own life and you’ve saved the world as much as you have hurt it.

You rise and cross the space of kitchen and you think, if you can claw and clamber and get this little piece of happiness, then maybe you can keep it.

Her skin is warm when you put your lips against it, freckles pressed to your mouth. And it is familiar, all at once. This is skin that you once hungrily licked and then jokingly bit. This is skin that grew bloody and bruised in schoolyards, that you swore to protect at all costs. Skin that once broke so easily but is now strong, almost invincible. This skin that you have hurt, held, bled for, died for.

You’re both here, existing in the same world and time. Despite everything, you’re here. It shouldn’t be so simple, but in the end, it really is.

Stella stills, almost dropping the jam jar, fingers idle by the lid.

You are not sure you trust yourself to breathe, let alone remove your lips from her person; it seems to be the only thing rooting you to the spot, the only part of Stella Owens that you got a chance to kiss before you broke and got rebirthed. For all you know, you’re playing out fantasies while locked in a mental ward.

When you step back, slow, and she faces you, you look her straight in the eye, meeting a wide green eyes and seeing your own want reflected back at you, a mirror of nearly a lifetime. You are sure to let her see your eyes, to let her scrape away the final shards of dirty glass that’s obscured a raw substance, frothing in you since you first started picking fights in the streets of Paraparaumu.

You have never been a fighter, but now you fight tooth and nail, battling away a lifetime’s worth of blood and swallowing wards. You are tired, have been awake for far too long, but you tilt your chin up and look her square in the eye, a challenge and a question and a fight all in one.

And you are so, so still.

“Oh.” She breathes out in a rush, against your mouth, surprise pinking her cheeks.

You’re not sure when you started shaking, but you only notice when she does it too.

Stella nods, slowly, mouth brushing your temple. “Okay. I- okay.”

There is a moment, as your breathe each other’s air, when you think she’ll backtrack, rewind the play which you have set in motion. She pulls back slightly, lips quirking, and you know just like that that the conversation is far from over. Not even close. Your heart trips over itself, and even with sleep prodding at your eyes with itchy finger you know without a doubt you will follow whenever she leads this next, til the end.

She turns to leave, you follow. There is all the usual pretence of getting ready for bed, of sleeping on opposite sides of the same mattress like you have been doing for months, bodies forming opposing parenthesis that do not touch. She brushes her teeth and you wash your face and the two of you are quiet, comfortable with all the time in the world.

It does not feel like you are teetering on the edge of a cliff, but maybe that’s because you had resigned yourself to falling a long time ago, oblivion in the midst of loving and living for the best person you’ve ever known. Sleep plucks at your muscles, moving you sluggishly around the bathroom, manoeuvring you precariously into the bedroom, keeping you close to Stella always.

You crawl into bed, and the empty space between you bodies feels like Paraparaumu all over again when Stella rolls onto her side. Though you don’t touch, your limbs complement each other, and were you closer, you’re sure that you’d notch together just so; rotate, rotate, click.

You like that your story leads to here, body hungry, heart hungrier, feeling for the first time in years that you can breathe. The war ended years ago, but only now does it feel like you are coming home.

You have gotten used to sleeping, taking naps as opposed to the standard eight hours of rest, so you do just that, exhaustion knocking you out into clear undisturbed slumber down until the sun rises, familiar across the cut of her cheeks and the swop of her eyelashes.

Stella’s still there when you wake, even after all this time.

She lifts her hand to your face. “Can I�"”

The angle is off kilter and you’re not sure you will ever get used to looking up to do this, but you kiss her just the same. And it is not eager or desperate it just… it is. Inertia, gravity, simple fact.

You rise to the occasion and she meets you blow for blow, looking down as you are looking up and when you collide, you crash, words and confessions and clichés not part of this story. Words never felt necessary, for you heart is hers, always has been.

There is not huge earth shattering realization to be had because you are here, and you have lived through a thousand years, a thousand lifetimes, a thousand shades of red, to get to this point. But it is not the victory lap you had considered, nor the disappointment you had feared. It just is solid undeniable fact that you are here, in this bed, kissing Stella Owens, her knees knocking against your knees and her toes still cold as they press against your calves. In all your guiltiest dreams you had never imagined the simplicity of it, had never pictured a world in which Stella was not made to be swept of her feet in some grand romantic gesture. A world where the basic whole of you was somehow worthy. A world where Stella was inevitable as the rising sun spreading across your skin. Kissing Stella feels inevitable. Not even predestination or fate, because inevitability came before that too and no one could have predicted that in any one lifetime that she would choose you.

The two of you fall into each other and you are inevitable. Stella, is inevitable. You want to apologise for not knowing, never knowing, but the mere movement of her lips against yours steals those apologises and delivers them back in spades for reasons you have never discussed, but have all the time in to world to dismiss away.

She presses her thumbs to your skin. “I didn’t know.”

And she didn’t, how could she? You, who have spent ages six through thirty wearing a mask over your eyes.

Stella knows nothing about you, is not a grownup in all the ways that you had thought at six years old, watching a skinny girl with dainty fists and a stubborn face.

Her fists are not dainty against the small of your back, but that’s not the important part (it never was). That steel, solid resolve not to budge an inch, resides in such an identical version to your memory that your face aches with the size of your smile.

You feel your age and your name settle in the marrow of you in a way they never did before. For the first time since breaking Andrew Peters’ nose in a Paraparaumu playground, there’s a chance you might have a place in this world, after all.

Your memories and recollections might not be entirely clear but the second she kisses you back, you are absolutely sure that if this isn’t happiness, then is doesn’t exist.

And you are not a grown up, you might never be, but you think you could teach Stella Owens a thing or two.

----

You are thirty one years old. Your name is Tasha.

You fit.