i don't wanna be around you anymore (i can't stand to be around me anymore)

[dmboogie]

((Names that didn’t matter, spoken by a man who didn’t matter, heard by a girl that didn’t matter.))

Crude even for a dragon, belching bile instead of fire, slowly corroding the memory of the dead instead of purifying the bodies and leaving only bleached bones. No, the man himself didn’t matter, only the metaphor - the deliverance he represented.

Roxanne was making the most of it, like she made the most of every moment. Roxanne was sitting under a tree, alone, because she had left and been left in turn. She had wanted to lay down in the grass but the pouring rain had pounded puddles into the ground, and she was soaked, but not submerged. Freedom was fire but it wouldn’t make her clothing any drier.

Everyone was alive, in that if you had asked Roxanne to spot the difference in the island’s roster between this announcement and the last she would have come up blank. Faces and names and people that didn’t live in her heart, so once they were gone it was as if they’d been completely erased from reality.

Everyone was dead, in that everyone had irrevocably changed and was being warped further and further with each passing moment, their senses of self dissolving like a sand castle at high tide, and some would surely grasp hold of their shifting skin and shape themselves into a monumental tower, and some would simply melt into the beach where they would stay for the rest of time.

Beryl would never change again. Beryl was set in decomposing stone, her brain leaking into the atmosphere. Roxanne had an image of who Beryl was, framed safely inside the locket that was her heart, but the picture had shattered the moment she had woken up as herself, and she would never get a chance to compare that portrait with who Beryl had become, if she’d had time to become anyone. She didn’t know, thus she ceased to matter. She could only look ahead, only trust what her eyes saw.

Roxanne didn’t matter, because no one knew Roxanne. She hadn’t given anyone the chance. She hadn’t been ready yet. Her perfect moment on the cliffs had been intruded upon, Marcy’s perfect reunion in the gardens had been spoiled, the perfect narrative of comfort and companionship from strangers in the other gardens had been abandoned, just like herself.

And this was fine! This was exhilarating! Roxanne hadn’t had the strength to matter, because she hadn’t had the time to stand alone, as herself, to etch her name in the very essence of her being. But now, she’d had an entire day to think, and act, and travel, and feel, every sensation that she could be unknowingly experiencing for the very last time becoming fresh and new, shaping her in the fires of creation, each new breath she took harmonizing with her euphoria.

She didn’t matter yet. But she could. Before she’d thought that she’d wanted people - but no. She’d needed them, because she had been weak, despite all her pretense. But she didn’t need them any longer, and thus it was time for her to want again.

She would find someone - anyone would do, for her preconceptions could easily be abandoned now that everyone had changed and would change. She’d do whatever it took to be acknowledged. She would matter.

((She grabbed her bag and shotgun and walked into the brand new day, unconsciously humming a song she’d made with the people she’d sworn to forget.))