She decided to kill herself the same way she decided everything else. Compulsively. With that flick of a wrist and flash of a pen, and she wrote out the will she’d been planning for too many years, with too few thoughts and only a couple of tears. It didn’t seem real. Not the pills or the knife, or the tremble in her fingers as they started to drip, blood the color of newely cut sausage, and spilling her life onto the light colored wood might have seemed strange to some people but it seemed appropo to her. normal even, the logical conclusion finally, to an illogical and improbable life. She was still bleeding when the paramedics started pressing the buzzer and she had to think through think pretty clouds of pale amber to remember how they had known what girl to save in this anonymous city – because she hadn’t told anyone. There really was no one, finally, left for her to tell. And god knows her dog wasn’t good for telling anyone, lying there, a fuzzy pile of poodle, waiting for her to feed him, bathe him, clip the hair near the ears and balls she’d been too broke, and then too lazy, finally to get cut.

Too compassionate, that was the lie she always told, but really it always laziness.

And this time there really hadn’t been anyone left. Every bridge had been burned – lost to the whirwind hurricane created in the moments between life and something like it. So she shivered, and wrapped the still bleeding arm in a pile of old rags and covered that with her jacket, and waited for the buzzing to stop. But of course this was America. Every freedom except sex, abortion, and suicide. And so they busted through her door until it lay splintered and broken in pieces on the floor made of its ancenstors, and she found herself staring into the face of one who might have died, but didn’t, and so now saved those who would have been her, had she not been saved.

And in that moment kate could see her own fate. The ridiculousness of it all. To save or be saved. And she wished the knife had gone just a little deeper, the pills moved through her bloodstream a little faster, her courage to kill a little more intense, because now she would have to live, and not only live, but cease that life and be grateful for it when all she had ever wanted was the quiet anonymity of a grave. And the nonsensical reminder of an epitath. Here lies the girl who could not live. Life gave her all she desired in this sweet death.

But that was not to be.

And maybe selfish is the word of the god she was to honor now, in living. She did not know, did not pretend to know.

But allowed herself to be removed from the room of wood and splintered doors and did not speak as she was strapped to the gurney, all metal and crisp cotton sheets against the contour of her naked back. Knowing that she looked all the more insane for her nudity. That the shirt and sweatpants lying on her bed, had she grabbed them, would have offered her the safety of respite, and that in remaining as she was, she offered them distance. Kept them in the real world and herself apart. As though they could assure themselves of her difference, her horrible abomination simply by noting her lack of shame. As though that were enough – and the suicidal marks upon her arms superfluous. It was nudity that scared them, and all at once, that saved them.

“After we get out of here” she heard it whispered in her head as though there were others living within her, other beings secreted within her spine and sharing stories like secrets. “shhhh” she pressed them into service, siting in this hospital bed, unpleasant though it were, and cast about in her mind for the moment when time would shatter into a million pieces and gather her into its fold, until she would lose herself again. But it didn’t happen. It never happened in places like this where it could happen, only on the worst possible days, in the worst possible places – where it never should happen. And she shivered behind the thin layer of paper cotton they had given her to guard herself from prying eyes, pretending it was to keep away the chill, and knowing all along it was only to ever make her feel more like them, no matter how little like them she would ever be.

She decided to kill herself again during art theray, when she felt the first cool press of the sponge against her hand. It might have been warm, the paint thick and sticking to her flesh in clumps, blues and reds, the yellow of hope like an eyelash some child might wish upon in some future, far from now.

Again during music, when the soprano who could have been a girl – why should boys sing that high ? – made her cry with the purity of his touch, the sweet