Breathless blood

There was once a girl the shade of breathless blood, a special, mineral blue.  No one knew that she cried and laughed in her sleep, though many had shared her bed.  She walked alone under white lights and muted stars in a city she still did not know.  The sun was too bright there, the rain too cold.  The weed was good, but coke was too expensive.  Sweets were too inexpensive, and the bread could sit on a shelf for a month and not go bad.  There she did not live, there she simply was. She supposed that made her dead.
In the deeper nights, the ones with no fog or even moisture in the air, she could see starlight in the square of light her window let onto the floor.  The window was hers, she still didn’t feel she owned the floor.  
So many stars.  So many billions of tons of burning and heat and wrath.  Fusion, she’d read somewhere.  Fusion was hotter than fire, sexier.  Quite a trick really, she could burn, she couldn’t do a damned thing to her atoms.  Hotter than fire, and so many of them.  She could barely see them on those cold streets, where tiny sparks in glass bowls defended the night from darkness and space lights alike with a pallid and chilled veil of amateur illumination.
She worked, she slept, she drank, she ate, she drew on post-it notes, and she wandered.  That was the biggest part of her day.  Like a glimmer lost in the depths of the ocean, she was incandescent jetsam without motive or direction.  She wandered the internet at work, and the streets before giving up the prospect of living and settled like silt in a bar or coffee house.  She could have done this forever, though she would never have believed it. She returned to her bed, one night with too few stars, and she fell into it not bothering to undress.  She dreamed.
She’d read somewhere that dreams are just the dandruff of a mind shaking itself; the waste paper of a ritual filing program.  This was something she depended upon.  She would sit before sleeping with the light off, in envagled starlight and pray to her subconscious.  She would beg and plead, she would focus and meditate.  She would will the paper clerk of her memories to take a way what had happened, but to leave all that she had felt.  She was indigo, with gray shading and highlights of cerulean.  She could look no further back than today without sobbing deep Texas sky colored tears.  It was too big, the past, and she could not see that she stood upon it only that it stretched back through 22 cloudy years.  It wasn’t sadness that hurt her; she assumed it was what she was made of.  It was the regret.  So much better to be without love than to have murdered it.  And so she dreamed terrible dreams of opportunity scorned and wisdom cast away in favor of lager and glucose.  She awoke, every morning, with a candy colored hope in her heart, because she had forgotten that after all she was only an Azul.
Life, of course, forced upon her the same sad conclusions every morning before she even left the house for work.  She was confronted with evidence of the night before. Sometimes it was just her reflection in the mirror. Other times it was her reflection in the man in her bed, whoever he may have been.   
Sometimes, she awoke in a place that did not smell of her.  On these wonderful mornings she would not learn of who she really was until she discovered that she was not welcome.  She was never welcome in the sunlight, only in the electric night.  So she would return to her apartment, and she would need a cleansing dream all over again.  Instead she would shower and change.  She would see herself in the mirror blending into the steam lines on the glass.  Then go to work, with no greater intent than to see what parts of her childhood or her homeland she could find on Youtube, or to see if there were any maple bars left in the kitchenette at the office she called “the sponge.”  
On a day that followed a night spent under someone else’s window, there were four maple bars.  Everyone else had chosen glazed or nut sprinkled.  She felt special.  Oddly, she felt loved, even held.  She ate them all. It was like swallowing semen, and like licking the cake bowl and spoon.  She saw yellow.  She heard it too.  Even in the throws of that afternoon’s sugar crash, she still felt warmed from within and far too awake to dream.  If she wished to sleep at all, to erase the memories of her endless typings at the sponge, and of her humiliation the preceding dawn, distilling the day into the maple afterglow of her breakfast of carbohydrates, she would have to get dead off her feat drunk.  It might have been Friday.  It probably was.  She could do it.  Waking up that Saturday would be heaven.  She thought idly of destroying her mirrors that night before bed, but she knew she would be too tired and too intoxicated to manage it. Besides, she would need the focus to perform her nightly ritual.  Her needs overwhelmed her, but they always did.  She didn’t notice anymore.  She supposed that this meant she was dead; a blue Jedi ghost, weaving in and around streetlamps craving everything.
She left work at six thirty seven, just as the Sun sank into the ocean and walked with the in rushing fog toward her apartment.  She passed the Basil and the Tonic.  She had gone home with regulars too recently… or maybe it was something else. The time just didn’t feel right.  She found herself at Moonstar.  It was happy hour and the crowd was young.  She didn’t want to be too distracted.  This was all about medicine.  Whisky sours and something with Tequila in it.  She didn’t make eyes at the boys, and she thought in Spanish so that she would not hear anyone offer her a drink.  The talking in the room moved to the background, and then the periphery, she was alone in Moonstar.  At least as far as she was concerned.  
Time is slippery in Moonstar regardless of how much you’ve had to drink; the atmosphere lubricates the seconds and your throat and wallet.  She had lost her footing on such slick grounds and flipped gracelessly to land on her hip on 1AM.  It was past her bedtime, but her mind still didn’t want to go home.  She looked around to see if anyone would take her while her mind made itself up.  Now the crowd was older, much older.  Looking had brought the English noises at Moonstar into the background again.  So she contemplated ordering another … whatever.  Then the background ran deafeningly back onto her center stage as she heard a string of words that she had so loved once, “I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
“Hemingway said that.” She said idly, her vision suddenly unfocusable.  
“I know I did” was the reply, “I quote myself often in places like this.  It makes me seem well read.”