Girl in Pieces

I should make a correction. I don’t want to be misleading. I say that Ellis killed herself, but she did not die die. She isn’t in the ground, I can’t visit a graveyard and drop daisies over well-tended grass or mark an anniversary on a calendar. There were drugs, there was the wolf boy, and she slid very far from me, the wolf taking up all of her heart, he was that greedy. And when the wolf was done, he licked his paws, he left her gaunt, my Ellis, my plump and glowing friend, he took all her light. And then, I guess, she tried to be like me. She tried to drain herself, make herself smaller, only she messed up. Like Mikey said, cutting wasn’t her thing. I imagine her room soaked in blood, rivers of it, her parents fighting upstream to get to her. But there was too much, do you understand ? A person can only lose so much blood, you can only starve the brain of oxygen for so long, or you can suffer anoxic brain injury after hemorrhagic shock, which emptied out my friend and left only her body. Her parents sent her somewhere, a place like where I am, but far, far away, across whole states, and tucked her into her new home full of soft sheets and plodding, daily walks and drooling. No more hair dye, no more fucking, no more drugs, no more iPod, no more clompy boots, no more fishnets, no more purging, no more heartbreak, no more me, for Ellis. Only days of nothingness, of Velcroed pants and diapers. And so I can’t can’t can’t do what I am supposed to do: touch her, make it better, brush the wild hair from her face, whisper sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.