On Taylor
by Kaitlyn Stocker
It was summertime, and I was in a bad place. A soul-wrecking,
nightmare-inducing, roller-coaster ride from hell. I’m talking about
waking up every morning still drunk in some unrecognizable hell hole
with no clue how I got there and no desire to find out. I’m talking about
the kind of dirty you can’t bathe away. These were my dark days -- when
the cuts on my wrists were too fresh to scar, when my lips tasted like a
dozen strangers with names I couldn’t recall. I lived a life of compulsory
self-destruction; because I had ceased belonging to the functioning world,
I felt compelled to become its antithesis.
That summer, amidst the carnage of my deteriorating life, I met a girl
named Taylor. Ordinary name, isn’t it? Deceptively so. Taylor was
fascinating, vibrant, an enigma. I’m not going to be able to tell you
exactly what was so wonderful about her, but I’d imagine it’s something
like love at first sight with a dash of tragedy and sin thrown into the
mix. I met her at some party and it struck me immediately that she was
different; somehow more than anyone else I’d ever known.
Taylor had a lip ring. I’m not sure why that’s important, but it is. She
kissed me and I tasted something entirely foreign, a savage energy that
I wanted to know as intimately as my own mind. Hers was an essence I
wanted to conquer. Finally, I’d met someone as wild as I was, as deeply
and utterly taken with destruction and the seemingly limitless nature of
man’s capacity for wreckage.
Our affair was brief -- we met on a few other occasions, at parties, late
at night when the black sky hushed up doubts and brought our darker
natures forward. I suppose we were never really lovers, but I like to think
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