When Nadine used to write little diary entries, she got into the mode where every poem I written was a suicide letter in miniature; a song about the lost moments of life. In their slow rhythmic melodies, she laid the groundwork for my own inner destruction. And there was a part of her that relished the thought of being completely forgotten.

She fantasized of severed necks and blood on the floor. She dreamed of guillotine blades for whose death the people shall not ignore; she dreamed of blood squirts and gore. Dreamed of music boxes, and the fear of whether she could eventually be open about her own sexuality, like blood flowing from the wound of Adam’s apple like the sound of crickets chirping in the darkest of midnight hours. Nadine dreamed of her own inner life, fallen to pieces. Her life, her story; her own self-destruction. Yet there was something holding her back.

Something that she didn’t want to acknowledge.

That she wasn’t the only one in this world, on Purgatory Road, where the crickets always chirp no matter the time of day; where the music box plays broken children’s rhyme, and not always stories of urban decay.

Now she types arcane programs, to distract from herself; her words flowing like fractured Ruby syntax on green screen monitors. The flow of AES and financial transactions; she wasn’t sure how long she could keep the job, if they knew how old she really was. Then she would be left alone again, to rot along the floor like she did all those years ago.

To rot to her own inner life.

The vampire life.

“Richy, you said this would be the last powder.” Her name wasn’t Richy for one thing, but it took forever to get someone to finally gender you properly. Nadine also had only recently gotten this new robotic arm and leg. Now she scooted through life, as nothing but the dregs of her former existence. The laptop provided a light that attracted gnats.

“Just one more powder, then I’m done.” Nadine said.

“You said that last night.” Blanci wasn’t the one that should really make judgments based on people’s disabilities. Nadine’s own, other than her own absence of a left arm and right leg, was apparently not obvious. It wasn’t like she wasn’t waking up at nights out of breath. Out of breath, she went through life like a speeding bullet train popping powders like jaw breakers for tots. “I’m not your mother Richy.”

“Don’t call me Richy, it’s Nadine.”

Sometimes life felt like an absurdest drug PSA. Dropped in from a CIA helicopter, one hand gun aiming toward the finish line–someone’s skull. An adrenaline high more potent than the most reflexive of fight or flight responses. Like a robot fist hammering your personal alarm clock like an old introduction cliche; the story of the rest of her life before she found the game called Uploaded Fairy. “Look, you don’t have to understand my condition. But at least don’t be a dick.” Nadine said.

“Richy, I’m a lady. Not a dick.”

Nadine inched very close to Blanci’s face.

“Ladies can be dicks too. They can have them as well.”

It was one of those nights where the only way to resolve a personal problem was a one thirty two caliber in the brain, and two hammered right into your phantom knees. “They can certainly be scared of rats.”

Blanci, from the point that Nadine had met her, never took kindly to this aspect of her past, though she refused to admit this. She simply ignored Nadine for the rest of the night. Midnight finally closed at five in the morning, multiple hours past the sound of quietness in the air. Nadine preferred to spend her time listening to listening to songs like “Ma France” than Blanci’s shit. Yet also knew, at least for the time being, they needed each other.

Perhaps Nadine more than Blanci.

“Fine, none for tonight.”

Life flowed like scattered bits of rain.

There was something about the weather that, despite its intrinsic coldness, did not make Nadine want to go back to living with Blanci. When you compared her with Brittney, it only made sense that her only satisfaction is to see Nadine suffer, at least it seemed so at the time. Yet the monotonous buzz of my robotic limbs made Nadine want to keep searching for meaning in a world without, even if that meant digging for scraps in a local dumpster.

That was how she ended up finding a new shell for spark plug. Spark plug was mostly in decent shape, but had a few dings and scratches. The major issue was rust stain on the shell. Nadine took coordinates of the width, height, and depth of the main frame. An old model morphing into the new, almost as if the old designer knew what the most current update in the design would be. There was something in the design that made Nadine want to hold onto her lost youth, despite the very obvious indication of its futility.

She no longer dreamed of the world above; she simply desired for at least one simple night where I could sleep normal sleep, and dream normal dreams. She desired total oblivion. But the old lucidity drove out demons like holographic witches, whose special brew was fish poison.

Life flowed like scattered bits of rain. Scattered screenplay scripts, where the only spare page was some vague resemblance of ones autobiography, the smell of artificial cheese and canned English peas on cardboard flavored crust, being the only thing of real enjoyment, aside from a girl named Lidier. Ladier was a mixture of Hispanic and Francophone. Her father was Spanish, her mother French. She would entertain her when Brittney would not. Nadine took life as an abstraction, not it was all concrete, but always with a bit of humor and a smile. Yet behind the eyes, was something that she only recent began to understand. A total sense of isolation.

A total outcast in love.

Sometimes the way that people look, can vary considerably from how they actually are as a person. One may appear innocent, but be completely corrupted; the inverse is often also the case.

For Nadine, as she indulge in the pleasure of the lady’s faces in digital entertainment, often she recalled back to when she would meet girls in the earliest of her grade school years. Those years ago, when her soul was much more free, she wanted to join the secret service, but found it to be to much for her heart. Whenever she saw other girls that were more pretty than her, she would often become jealous of their particular assets. Whether this was their style of their Birkenstock sandals, or the color of their flowing dress.

At the time she would fantasize about girls having their heads cut off, and nobody ever bothered to tell her that girls that had that done would ultimately die of their injuries. Nadine would want to put her own head on their body in their place. One girl that she knew in this school, with blond curls in her hair she vocalized this particular feeling, without clarifying the fact that she didn’t actually want to cut her head off. All that to say, the school was not quite sure how to handle someone like Nadine. But the Spanish girl of Italian parentage was never subject to this particular jealousy. For the girl with the black rose in her hair, there was no love to share.

Nothing but a life turned to dust.

Yet now, beneath the iron sky turned to rust and red rain, under the sky of thousand suns, Nadine never felt brave enough to voice any of her feelings. She was left jotting notes of a former life.

The life of a new alley cat.