SNUFF

(start at the beginning)

When I wake we're in the desert. The sun is low in the sky behind casting a pale cool glow before us. This is my favorite time of day out here, a time of birth but locked in a meditative moment where everything gives pause. The silence of the world is revealed in this place, alive but not quite awake. You can feel it, hear it, see it all in the calm light of morning, before the bleating cries of humanity gasp for breath, before they come to cut the umbilical.

Lila tells me that she couldn't drive the whole night through. She tried but the halos of sleep interrupted her vision until the road grew dangerous. We slept at a rest-stop somewhere back in Arizona, can't remember the name of the place. That's how she is. It's unforgivable, she says, an attempt at order in a natural world grown from chaos. She hates all of it; names, categories, definitions, lines, corners, rules, any type of structure that tries to contain the burgeoning dream of existence.

It's destructive limitation, blasphemy. No wonder our first impulse is for war, to cause endless destruction upon the environment. We're simply rebelling against the chains that bind us, the social order that refuses to allow us to ever be truly free. We're lashing out, attacking the very structure that we implemented in the first place. We build it then we destroy it. A vicious cycle of hate taken out on ourselves. A bit misguided obviously.

She's ranting again but I can hardly hear her. I'm lost in wonder so her voice blends into the world at slumber, a soft drone at the back of my brain. To my right a distant mountain transforms into a prone figure of a woman on her side with her arm raised so that the crook of her elbow is resting on her head. I'm mesmerized by her. She is the soul of the desert, a guardian from the edge of eternity, a witness to the days of wane. One day she will awake and rise up on sturdy legs and find her way home. I wait for it, almost expecting it to happen right now at this moment but like me, she's not quite ready to depart from this world.

Lila takes the offramp and turns away from my vision. I decide not to show her. It's something I need for myself. We head south, toward my past, a place I haven't seen for years. Everything feels different. Massive shopping malls that weren't there before stand next to the road like beckoning giants, fervently wishing for the company of strangers, growing fat off our greedy consumptive souls. Fe, fi, fo fum. I smell the blood of desperation.

Lila's right. Sometimes the world seems so sick.

This place used to be empty. Nothing but vast flat sand interrupted occasionally by growing crops, a shocking green against the dry landscape, with the permanent smoke of sprinkled water hovering overhead to keep their delicate leaves from shriveling in the bright heat. Nothing more. The hulk of two towns, one on the border, the other stuck out along the highway out in the middle of this huge valley. It was never a place for growth. It was just a place trying to survive between one destination to the next. It's a wonder civilization attempted to establish here at all but the febrile mind tends to reach beyond reason, hasty and wanting it conceives a consciousness that is clearly insane.

As we drive through town I begin to feel the hunger for nostalgia. Once we pass the new development I notice that nothing much has changed. The familiar landscape caresses hidden sections of my brain. Rickety convenience stores and tortillarias lean with precarious treason at the clean world of commerce we left behind. I spot the infamous flea market, already pulsing with life and I want to it to Lila, get lost amongst the stalls, taste the greasy tamales and drink sweet sugar water. I want to make her laugh of my memories. She would love it, the type of realm that she longs to inhabit but we turn away and drive to my grandmother's house instead.

When we stop, I climb out of my seat with a stiff body but for some reason I don't feel as terrible as I expected. Through the dust raised by the wheels of Lila's car, the second home from my youth is revealed and my mind wanders away from future regrets. I'm no longer burdened by the weight of age beyond years. I am swimming down into the boundless prepubescent optimism that strangles my heart. I jump upon the porch and shake the dusty screen door shouting my grandmother's name, and somewhere in all of it I catch the aroma of fruit baking in the oven.

SNUFF

The moon cuts silvery pale lines along her porcelain skin. In the shadow she's pale as a ghost, but there's darkness all around her, engulfing her from her head down to her feet on the floorboards. I watch her hands move, her mouth move, her hair bounce around her shoulders. I think that she might be the most beautiful creature that I have ever seen, and I don't mean that because I'm in love with her, which I am but not in the way that everyone thinks. I mean it because she is the only person in the world that I can trust right now. She's the only person who believes in my mission.

Outside my window the night swirls around the landscape. The city lights vanished long ago, fading within our wake. Lila's cream comet cuts through the dark wedge like a meteor from decades before we were born propelling us forward toward that deep seated secret that worms around inside our warmth forcing goosebumps to sprout upon our skin. I shudder a bit and roll up my window, tired of feeling the cool air on my face. The orange-red glow of the car lighter shimmers on Lila's cheek as she sucks at the American Spirit, a faint smile rising on her lips as the nicotine takes effect.

I hear those are bad for your health.

It's a little joke we have between us. She laughs the way that she always does. That's why I love her. She's the only person who understands me right now.

She used to hate me, or so she says, a couple of years ago when we were still in high school. She said that I always acted like I was too good for them. I pretended that I didn't know what them she was talking about but I did know. I did act like that. Although it doesn't really bother me now, thinking about how I was before my body began to feel shallow and empty, before the nightmare descended upon me. I was thoughtless and careless, buried in my nescient life. Many of us would recognize the teenage pattern that gave way to my adolescent years. I just don't care about those feelings and thoughts anymore. They weren't real. They weren't above the shallow depths we drown ourselves in. The one echo that falls upon my heart with ease is the shun of shameless regret.

Over the past year I've learned that regret is the force of fading into insignificance. It is the debilitating focus of limits that we put on our lives. It is the heart of anxiety. It leads us into locked rooms with burnt out bulbs so that we can no longer see our shriveled selves. It is everything that I've left back in the dark of the rear view mirror. It is the self before we know that we are going to die.

Lila squeezes my leg with her warm hand. She knows when I ingest these bitter pills and descend into depressive thoughts. She is the essence of fire and she burns brighter than any star that might shine my way. I trust her beyond control right now. I give my life to her and take all that she's promised me because I know that she will deliver. She will take me into the darkness where she resides and allow me to climb inside my magenta core. She will allow me to consume every ounce of my precious life , which is all that I ask. It's all that I have left.

Please let me have that one simple truth, I screamed out loud.

She was the only one who truly heard me. Now she's whisked me away and together we are going to travel to the far distance, beyond the breathing beating shaking pulse of humanity. We shall unmask the twisted reality of the cosmos. Maybe then my life will find its meaning. Maybe then I can impart some value into the world, or at least feel good about where I am heading.

Who am I kidding? All I ever wanted was to be left alone so that I might understand my tiny place in this life. But that's impossible when you're pristine perfection to be idolized and fraternized and eternalized into someone else's vision. How can you understand beauty when it's shaped for someone else's consumption, for other's to fawn over. They don't know who I truly want to become, where my heart lies. They only know their own sick hunger that rises up through their endless deceitful entrails. They only know how to capture the creature, a hunted animal that should be tamed for their amusement. They never realize that the structure they impose is slowly devouring us, making us fleshless, naked bones on this corrugated island of conformity. They don't care that their seed is poisoning us turning our insides to death.

Lila's fire is suddenly inside me, climbing up through my heart. I can hardly breath. I jerk my leg away and her hurt eyes catch mine for a split moment, but I can't think about it. She'll understand. I clutch at the window crank with my claws and manage to get it open enough to feel the cold air on my face once again. I gulp at the night. My breath gasping, my heart racing, I struggle to live. I tremble beneath the oncoming shadow that rears before me. With wide eyes I search desperately in the dark fog, look for the tender touch I was always promised. But I don't see anything.

That's when I black out.

(go to 3rd departure)

SNUFF

Hello, My name is Kirsten K----, and I am going to die.

I think that for as long as I live, which will not be long, I would rather not hear the word inoperable again. They give you all the technical terms, show you all the scans and always remain professional, but there’s still something in their eyes…something that hits you with crushing weight; it forces the air from your lungs. That’s when you know the finality of it all.

At first, the days don’t feel the same. Everything is like a halo surrounding a dark center, bright hues at the edges. Things seem sharp and crystal, precious and yet so sad. You feel sorry for yourself, and you try to convince yourself that the time left is going to be an amazing Hollywood ending.

But reality lingers. The days still have twenty-four hours in them and each one is one step closer to the inescapable. I soon began to realize that nothing has changed. The world is still the same. The sky is still blue. The sun is still bright. My mother still annoys the hell out of me and I am living my life exactly as I always have.

That’s why I’m leaving. I have to get out of this place, wander around the open skein of the world for a little while. I probably will never see my parents again. Six weeks ago they told me I might have a couple months to live, if I was lucky. So I’m not expecting to make it back any time soon and I don’t expect to be giving any blustery good-byes. There have been more than enough tear stained cheeks and snotty noses in my life to last a lifetime. I will be slipping out the open window in my room, a short drop to the damp ground below and a quick dash into the vanishing. I will be their ghost, their little girl lost.

(go to 2nd departure)