Prayer

( There are 20 different versions of this story and all I did was pick one at random,)

“Destroy everything, no, lose, lose everything you have, then you'll have everything you ever

wanted.”

“I think you have something there”

It’s been a while since I left you. It’s been even longer since you said these words to me.

I loved you back then, we were two halves of a whole, you were a nihilistic bastard and I was a child you found on the streets. You had all these ideas and that was all you had. You admitted to trying to pick my pocket. You were hungry when you found me, I fed you, I showed you a place to stay. I gave you a place in my heart. I wasn’t much of a child then, I was about 15 and by my standards, I was grown. I had my own money. I lived in an alley with the beggars. I could sing all I wanted, but it did no good, there was no money to be made, so I sang in the streets next to an empty coffee canister. Rain or shine I was out there. Singing with everything I had inside, you loved to listen, you said. You stole from my jar when I looked away. You liked my music nonetheless, it matched me, you said. It was Gothic and eerie, you said, it could be deep and moaning, or high pitched and screaming. I should have tried to be famous; you kept on and on, flattering me. You didn’t know my back ground and I intended to keep it that way. I'd lived out all I wanted to, been there done that was my life’s story, and then I met you. I say you found me, maybe I really found you. I lured you to me and you helped me destroy the only things I had left. You took me under-wing after you freed yourself from under mine. You started buying me whiskey, cigarettes, and coffee, you always made sure I had black coffee in hand. I didn’t know what you were doing back then. I smoked a pack of those delicious menthol cigarettes a day. I was a small girl, I could feel the impact they had on me, and I was still growing. You weren’t kidding about losing everything, I could have gone into opera, I could have gotten onto Broadway. If only I’d been smarter, you said when I left you, I should have just stayed, you said. Losing everything was so different than doing it all. All you ever were was this lost man. A pedophile in every sense of the word, but never were you really. You roamed the streets of this big sad city just like me and mistook me for a woman. You never knew how old I was. Never once did you ask. There was 12 years between us, you never had a clue, if you even cared, I'm still proud that I kept so much from you. The only thing you never lost was your manners. The only thing I never lost was my love. I've always loved you in some form or another, even in hate I couldn't be awake without thinking about you all the time. I lost my voice and my fears; you lost your humanity and became this well-mannered monster. You pretended you wished me well, loving me as I loved you, but never the same. It seems you destroyed me from the inside out for a reason. You took pride in how I looked, I wasn't stupid. You loved walking next to me; you felt good walking next to your trophy lover. You single-handedly hollowed me out and polished me. You made sure I stayed attractive, giving me your nihilistic ideas, “lose everything, that means weight too Doll,” “everything includes your old bust size” I had no idea what was going on. I lost my beautiful voice in the bottom of a bottle somewhere, it got husky, and I couldn’t even listen to myself anymore. I kept on though, I kept smoking, kept drinking, and we were together, we were together all the time, we never spent a second longer than we had to apart, and every chance we got we hid from the. World to enjoy ourselves you never knew half of who I was, but I knew you too well. We’d always be this way, you promised, I didn’t want it to be true, and then one day you were buying more whiskey and I got stabbed in an alley. I was so sad when the doctor said I had been pregnant, afraid you had heard, when I was with you I couldn’t have dealt with the guilt I would have felt for raising a nihilist. It’s a choice you make not something you should be born into. But you weren’t a nihilist, if I recall correctly. No word could describe you. You tried to play the savior for ten years with me, but I knew better. I knew you. It took a while before I realized the anger you had when I would sing, because my voice had failed so much. It wasn’t as godly as before, but you couldn’t kill it completely. I wasn’t losing everything; you just didn’t have enough effect on me. You didn’t know how many times I’d been pregnant. You thought it was once, that last time. I still shudder to think of how you reacted, you were so pissed. You thought, finally you could leave an imprint in the world, but I had ruined that. I'd gotten stabbed, and then you beat me more, I took every swing you made at me with a grain of salt, I mean, I really had done this to myself. I really got to the point where I would have felt like killing myself if I ever had to kill another one of your children. 6 children I killed and cared about. Yes, they were children, not little zygotes or first trimester feti. They were big, some of them. I had names for them, the ones that I felt love for, no matter how insignificant they seemed.

Cody was the first, she would have been cute, I didn’t have to kill her, she miscarried on

her own, Penelope would have been beautiful I'm sure, though I never saw her face.

Acenath, though killing Ace broke my heart. I was five months along with Ace; I got really clumsy and kept falling down. You just thought I’d been drinking more. We were drifting apart at that point, I had time to myself, I went to a shelter, I told them a little white lie so they would help me abort the pregnancy, when they asked about you, I told them if you found out you’d surely try to kill me, they asked why I hadn’t come sooner, I said I couldn’t get away. It was heartbreaking, but it seemed easier to walk after Ace was gone. Stuart was only a month. I figured out about that one early, and stabbed myself. I threw that knife so far; it probably landed on a building or in a dumpster. You really hurt me after Stuart died. I knew I could never give you a child; she would have been your weapon to the world. As much as I loved you, as much as I owed you for making me who I am, (if even that,) I could have never given you the satisfaction of raising an heir to your throne of philosophical monotony.

“I’ll love these lips forever” Remember that?

We used to go watch the sun set in the most beautiful places, and I would sit in your arms, on

your lap, and you would say the most beautiful things to me. You would promise me houses.

Pointless houses, only you said it so much more beautifully, you abused my Victorian manners, and you offered me utter happiness. I started believing in salvation, the belief that I deserved something better when it was all said and done. I had no idea what the future held, but I hoped for a picket fence and red bricks, I know that you knew, even then, that it was all lies, Why tell the truth, when the truth cannot be found? Preacher, you molded the thing I’ve become. I'm not sorry. I'm happy to be unable to call myself human. You always used to say “human is a general term for the gullible and unenlightened” maybe I was never human. You never called me one did you? You always called me Love. I still go by that. Love is the only name I have left. You never really knew me, and for that I'm sorry. I'm starting to think I was always one step ahead of you, afraid I was seeing this from the wrong point of view, am I the nihilist here? Did I use you to destroy myself? No. We both were. Maybe I said these words to you. No. No, you kissed me gently on the lips, and I could feel love, burning hate, and lust all together. That's what we were. Hormones and monogamy all mixed up with destruction.

Love. July 14th, 1995 and there I am, standing in the rain singing my heart out for tips,

and at first, I see you crossing the street, it's raining outside, I remember you called me stupid. Then you told me that I had forgotten to buy coffee, I remember laughing, and nothing until the coffee shop. The coffee shop where you took money from my own pocket to buy me a drink. You made me kiss you before you would give it up. We walked around all day in the rain. You never left my side, and rarely did we say a word. I just didn’t like talking, I don't think I would have listened. You walked me to where you were sleeping, under an old bridge, I offered to stay with you, you smiled at me, and quoted one of my songs, it was an old song I hadn’t thought about in a while, but I picked up the verse and you sang along, we sounded like songbirds in the damp cold that night, singing under the clouds that hid the moon from us. I stared at those clouds for hours, as if I blamed them for making me like you, I never saw the moon that night, but I always blamed it for us. You had lain down by the time I gave up on the sky, and you pretended to sleep, I curled up next to you to hide from the cold, and you wrapped your arms around me tight. You whispered in my ear until I fell asleep, I was so comfortable; every day was different with you, new places new faces, new views of the night sky. Because from then on I insisted that we stay out all night, and sleep all day. You made me into a great pickpocket, we would use the credit cards and debit cards at shady little stores that didn’t care if you looked nothing like your I.D., we bought groceries and liquor and cigarettes, and we survived. We never paid a bill, we never really slept in the same place twice either. I never wished we’d had a mattress. We got into a pattern, after that first night, we would smoke and drink all night most nights, walk until we couldn’t anymore, buy two

packs of smokes for the next day, and find a place to sleep the day ahead away. Waking up each night, we would buy whatever we wanted to eat for the night, usually powdered donuts and milk, and we would walk all over the city, leaving a trail of cigarettes behind us. We would climb fire escapes, and watch the city around us move and breathe as if it were living. We would have sex, and we would get drunk. It never mattered what things we liked or didn’t. We were the only two people left in the world; at least, that’s how I saw it. No one else ever mattered to me. Only you.

CODY. I loved you. You were my morning and night, my first love, my everything, and I’ve

never loved as wholly since you. You used to tell me, that if I loved anything else, I could never love you. You knew I loved using my hands, and I used them for so much, I was still a

songwriter, still an artist and you pulled my fingernails off. I'll never forget how you held my hands down one at a time and pulled them away with the pliers, I thought the bleeding would never stop, but when it did, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t draw anything. I was in hell. This was my hell, my hell that you created for me. I loved you more for it. I still tried to draw sometimes, but the pain was excruciating. I was pregnant at the time; I decided you would never find out. That miscarriage was my subconscious revenge. Cody was the name I gave the poor fetus. Not that it would have been too big of a deal. It was only a miscarriage. I was three months pregnant on August 12, 1995. I was 15 years old, nearly 16, we had been together as we were for nearly a year, but time went so fast, and it just kept going. My birthday in September, the holiday I call Yule, they all went unannounced. New Year’s we slept all day, never letting the world stop us from anything. On January second, it snowed, huge flakes the size of a quarter. I’d never seen snow before. We played like the children did all day. I prayed it would always be bliss between us. That night, I remember having an awful dream. I dreamed we were different people, and that you led me on, and broke me into pieces, I woke up and wrote sad little things down, things that have made me cry every time I read them ever since. My fingernails had grown back, but I rarely wrote anymore, and it hurt still to write, not actual pain, just the memory of the pain. I think that maybe it’s the excess of pain I was feeling that night that made me put words onto paper again. I would have rather died than admit some of these things to you. “No, I still smile when you're around, because I could never lie in front of you.” In some ways, it was true, I had a hard time lying to you, so instead, I didn’t say anything. I just held my tongue. Shut up. Drew a picture in my head. Left well enough alone. You never were one to pry, thank you for that. You made my life easy, sleeping in that alley was difficult, and sleeping with you was beautiful. I'll never forget all those beautiful places you showed me.

We started watching people, it was a phase we went through, we watched them so intently it seemed we could gather their life's story just from studying their body language and watching them eat their picnic lunch in the park. I never realized how docile the abusive husbands looked in public, how fragile the wives, it scared me, the people I least expected, we would follow home, watch them drink and throw her across the room, you knew people, you knew life. I remember how you always mumbled “c'est la vie” when he would smack her, say “pathetic,” when she would say “sil vous plait,” and “je t'aime,”. There were two classes in the scum of the world category, Molesters and the Abusive, and I saw it all, peeping toms, which I guess we were, Kiddie Catchers, Skirt Chasers, Hand-Raisers, you knew their next move like you were calling the shots, you knew who would do what when, and you were never wrong.

Cody was the first thing that made me see how imperfect we were, as a functioning

organism, we fought like mad, and we clung to one another like the world was falling away under our dirty feet. I can't think of a day that I didn't wonder if I stayed out of fear or love, but I always knew you would keep me safe. I think it was instinct that bound you to me, or vanity.

Having something to destroy, having something to watch burn, that's all you really wanted I guess, but those are your secrets.

 On July 30th, I realized I was pregnant again. Maybe not so much as I realized, as I was throwing up and I took a pregnancy test, and it was positive. I thought a lot about keeping this

one, telling you, and having a family, in my eyes we weren’t homeless, the city was our home.

So often people called us bums, but no one understood we had everything we wanted, everything we thought we would ever need. I didn’t even think about anything but how happy I would be, until I got this idea that you would raise her, the same way you treated me. Penelope, she became just another thing I had to give up if I wanted to love you. You were finally beginning to corrupt me and I became afraid. It was nearly impossible to gauge how long I’d been pregnant, I didn’t know if I was going to start showing early, or if it would be unnoticeable for months. I guessed it had been about a month and a half. My period was eternally unreliable because of my weight. I stayed pregnant for about three months this time. I didn’t know what to do; I was scared you’d hurt me, but I still drank so much all the time. I miscarried once after this, but I just let her go. Never had an emotion attached to her because she was so small. So new to living when I lost her. Penelope wasn’t so. I had her name tattooed on my lower back in Greek. My cure for everything now contains gin, I drank every day of my life at this point, but the gin made her leave me. I never understood why, but I drank a hell of a lot more once I got the hang of it all, and I was never more in love with you than at three in the morning after Penelope was gone, when you admitted you liked me. You always took things so slow. I never did. I always said it was love that first night. That starless night when we pretended we were alone in the world, just like every night since.

ACE. I got pregnant again, and I plotted killing you. Every night that I knew, I plotted

getting away, I had to act normal, As if nothing had changed, a new pack of cigarettes every

morning, another drunken dinner, day in, day out, until the baby died. December 2, 1999.

That evening, when we woke up, those cloves I bought the morning before, they were so

bittersweet. I felt like I’d done some wrong, my stomach wasn't just wrenching, it was full of butterflies and I wanted to hurl as if it would do some good. Acenath was the one I felt bad about; I always told myself she would have saved the world. She would have given, when I only took. From the second I knew her, to the second I killed her, I was completely attached to every feeling I had about her. Something about her was different; it was like as a fetus she spoke to me, as if she'd said to me “mommy, save me from you. I'm going to be bigger than you and daddy, there's nothing to fear, not if you save me.” but I couldn't there was no way to convince my hopeless heart that she was worth the pain she would cause me.

All the liquor in the world couldn’t make it better. My heart broke with her.

I died entirely inside when my little Ace died, I didn't know it was coming so hard, I didn't know

how painful it was going to be. I didn’t know it, or I would have left you. I became cold. I became the woman on the street that you see, and you become scared for your life or your children. Finality grew in each step I took, each seemed as though it would be the last. Each step I took, my heart broke deeper, and it showed. There were thick black circles under my eyes. It looked like eyeliner I cried off the day before, the kind that doesn’t wash off.

I didn’t even wear eyeliner. The thin corners of my little dried out mouth were perpetually turned down. It hurt to smoke cigarettes my lips were chapped so badly, but I did it anyway.

There was no spring in my step, my clothes were eternally tattered, my shoes had no soles, hell, I didn’t even have a soul. I had no soul, and you were virtually insane my love.

Do you see the problem here?

All the life and love I once had vanished, and I became a shell that revolved around you,

you controlled everything I did or said; my everything revolved around you. I ran away, I ran and aborted my dear Acenath. If I had one piece of you today, I would want it to be her.

MALLOREIGH. Malloreigh was the one that never made any sense to me. Malloreigh was

Imaginary, she was my biggest fear, and my body gave her to me. My body built her out of

Fluids and hormones and I still protected her. Nothing was ever a threat to her, so really she was the perfect child, because she was only real when I thought about her, she wasn't there, and I knew it, it was just too convenient. Most of the time though, it felt like my body didn't know, my stomach felt like it was rearranging, my chest felt like it was growing, I had to urinate every few minutes it seemed, and I vomited everything. You thought I was sick, even if I looked incredibly tortured by something smaller, I felt sick. At every mention of a child, every swallow of alcohol, every drag of a cigarette, I threw up, all of it made me more sick than I ever was pregnant. I was a fragile little girl with the emotional capacity of a clay pot and I was weak. Some days, looking back at her, she felt so real, she had feelings, and I felt them too, but other days, the rare days when I didn't think of her, she didn't exist, and everything was normal. Physically, she took more out of me than I could have ever fathomed was possible. I'd done pregnancy before, this was harder. I didn't like thinking about her because it felt so much more like guilt pains than a child, but she wasn't guilt. It's so hard to describe her to someone who's never convinced themselves they were pregnant, she felt like flesh and blood. My belly grew fast, I complained of being bloated. I grew fatter and fatter, just as I'd feared, but it wasn't all from her, she only had a way of making me believe in her. She was the place inside me, I couldn't go, because she made me believe she was a piece of you, she had this way of communicating to me like a conscience, and for once, I hung to every word as if it really meant something. Malloreigh, after time wasn't a thought on my mind and she stopped hurting me, but she remained a part of me because as real as she felt, she never died. Memories of her haunt me, but she really became my alter ego as time passed on, she was strong, she was brutal, she got things done when I was too weak to care. I spent a lot of time being sick after her, like all my defenses broke down, which was disheartening to say the least.

STUART. “Childhood is over the second you know you're gonna die.”

I don't know how old I was, All I know was I was sick of killing. I bought a knife from a pawnshop that looked like it had been used in a murder or something and carried it with me. I paid twenty-one dollars for it at the turn of the century for three years I carried that knife. Survivalism asks us to kill, nihilism asks us to be smart-asses who pretend to believe in nothing, and my instincts kept me from bearing children. My sick-and-tired of being let down heart fed my will to once and for all rid me of the chance that I might bear your child. It was September 11, 2003, and they no longer asked who you were drinking to when you bought a round at the bars, not anymore, not in this city. They didn’t even ask my age, all I really remember that night was you pissed me off when we left the bar. We had to go buy more liquor, and I was tired, tired of life with you, you went into the store, and I pulled a knife out of my sock, and plunged it into my lower abdomen, blood gushed everywhere, and I threw that knife with all I had in me. I muttered a prayer that I may live. To whichever god would listen to me, and I prayed until I couldn’t breathe. It was a week before I woke up; you were nowhere to be found. I was released, strangely enough, because they never found evidence I’d done

this to myself. I went out to the corner where I used to sing, and waited, for three days, waiting for you. You woke me up the next day and told me what you knew, about the idiots that stabbed me. I laughed inside. The hospital hadn’t even told you I was pregnant, that was for my dead family alone. I laughed inside, so fucking hard, and I told you. I told you everything and you blamed it on the medicine pumping through my veins like a conspiracy. You’d be surprised what killing your children could do to me, I wasn’t so dead looking as before, I was the creepy smiling hobo. The one that catches pigeons and bites their throats out, just to have blood running down my lips. I began to scare you I think. You began to distance yourself from me, you hated me for killing your children, you said I was crazy, but you believed me, “they could have been so great,” just like I knew you'd say “we” could have raised them to take on the world like we do everyday” I couldn't smile. I couldn't even pretend to share the enthusiasm. Just like I thought you would, you imagined your children starting a

revolution, your war children. I wanted blood running down my lips again, and you brought it to me in the hospital, after that, you left me until I found you by my old corner, but by February of 2004 you were gone just like the other hundred people that left every week. The city was drying up, no matter how beautiful I found it, it became dried out and empty without you. I never saw you again. That was it. The end. Nevermore. I'd found something though, a way to deal with your endless ideas that got us nowhere, a little too late, but I guess you'd consider it a lesson well learned. Killing helpless things was such a magnificent stress reliever. I tortured small animals and killed your children, I fucked you whenever I wanted, I watched the city breathe, and I was fine, even after you were gone, I watched the city live and I got by with the lint in my pockets.