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We've clawed fifteen dirty, crippled years from the gentle jaws of time.
Stop, drop and roll with the punches.
Fifteen years of crappy flats, empty bellies, and glue drying in paper bags and eyelashes.
Fifteen years of blinding sand and blazing sun in the worst part of Utah.
When I think of survival, I think of you.
I think of kicked-over beer cans and blacking out in the jungle gym and repulsive chemical nosebleeds in the pool and frenzied sprinting from drunken parents on roads that melt our shoes and sunburn on your back and the tiny freckles on your shoulders and the ugly, kissable scar across your collarbone and your slender fingertips pressing my nostril shut over a dust-grimed wrist.
An avalanche of sketchy messed-up memories.
You're slumped in front of the television, too high to change the channel, your dead, brown eyes half-lidded and glassy. The knees are busted out of your camo pants, and the soles of your boots are flapping off.
Home alone, we're eating rancid bar food brought home by your latest stepmother (club worker) and the shot glasses have been long abandoned in favour of chugging straight from the bottle.
Floris has flopped across your lap, her matted lapdog fur clumped with muck. Your bare knee is blotchy brown with soft, vitamin deficiency bruises.
You catch me looking and I pull a face, chucking a few offensive gestures in your general direction for good measure. You snort, eyes unfocused and roll clumsily over, mock-cuffing at my head, your filthy hair tumbling vomit-crusted over your face.
You're trying to speak, sloshed yelling in a myriad of tongues blurring into a slurred, slurryish, steaming sewer-stew of septic street slang enough to make any self-respecting American urchin blush.
I shriek back with equal animosity, throwing myself headlong at you, and the world narrows to a terrible, wonderful tangle of grimed limbs and dirty crimson hair and flailing punches.
You smell like Xanax and chlorine.
Floris scrambles away, yapping indignantly.
(Nyet, Flo, szarobure-!)
You press me down onto the floor, hand flat on my small, stunningly shatterable spine, and dig your fingers hard under my shoulder blade until I shriek and thrash and then we're struggling apart, gasping gutted fish on the stained carpet.
The tv blares white noise in the background and I watch as your eyes widen, pupils contracting to pinpricks, and sit up fast enough to snatch back your hair as you throw up your guts on the rug.
It's fetid, hued bright orange from whatever the fuck you found to eat and it makes my stomach turn.
You laugh, horrific, nauseating, gorgeously human, awful and delicious and stomach acid bile-burning between heaves and I roll my eyes so hard the world comes in blinks and flashes and wait for you to slow a little so I can thump you again. I want to take your pulsing heart in my hands and devour it alive. I want to tear out your steaming guts and smash them into ruby paste. I hate you more than I have ever loved anyone before.
You flounder sideways and drop your head into my folded legs, sobbing for breath. The room smells foul, the broken AC resulting in the stench of vomit and smoke and blunt force trauma.
I can't tell if you're laughing or crying.
It doesn't matter, really.
The pound of your disgusting, rotting heart is in time with the decaying beat of mine.
We're alive.