“Please.” It was barely more than a whimper that escaped her pale and cracked lips. I cradled her head in my hands, her bloodsoaked blonde hair curled around my shaking fingers as I slowly moved my hand over her face. She was weak, I could barely feel her shallow breaths against the palm of my hand as what little strength I could muster pressed against her sunken cheeks. Her icy blue eyes, unresponsive at first, opened wider than I had seen them in days.

There was the girl I loved.

I fought back tears as her gaze slowly made it to mine. The look she gave me wasn’t one of fear, or pain, or even anger. She looked...relieved. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, as if each ‘thud’ was its way of telling me not to do it. I wanted to listen, oh God did I ever. For a moment I could even feel my grip loosen. This wasn’t what I wanted, and a thousand rationalizations for moving my hand simultaneously flooded my brain.

But I did what was best. For her.

I wanted her to struggle. My jaw clenched as I thought about all the things she could do to show me that she wasn’t ready. I wanted to see her fight. That’s all she needed to do, fight. A kick, a scratch, a scream, a tear. ANYTHING.

But those icy blue eyes, they just looked at me and didn’t move. She was ready to go. I would’ve moved heaven and Earth to change that, but it wasn’t my decision to make. Slowly, unintentionally, my grip tightened. How could she? After everything we’ve been through, she’s going to just let it go, like this!? The anger was fresh, it was something I hadn’t felt before. This was what was supposed to be best for her. This was a way out for her. I was doing this for her.

And yet, it was my blood that ran hot. It was my teeth that were grinding together. It was my grip over her lifeless face that was so tight that the veins in my wrist felt like they would burst. I was no longer cradling the head I loved so dearly, I was trying to squeeze it into the nothingness that suddenly consumed me. Time and time again she flooded her veins with that garbage, filling her body with that filth that she chose over me. I spent countless nights hovering over her while she purged her stomach all over the bathroom floor, holding her hair back and thinking to myself ‘We can get through this.’ The nights she wasn’t a convulsing, vomit covered mess, she had disappeared without a trace. And those were the nights I felt most powerless. I wish it would have been as easy as worrying about her bouncing on some stranger’s dick after a few too many drinks, coming home with smeared makeup and a bullshit excuse.

But those nights I spent with my head tucked between my legs, teary eyed and deflated. I would sit at the edge of the bed, staring for hours at the spot where she would lie so peacefully after I had managed to shower and move her unconscious body. Every time I heard a noise out in the hallway, my heart would flutter like a lonely dog awaiting the return of his master. I’d rush to the living room and wipe the tears from my eyes, like it would be any less obvious. And as always the case, I’d stand there staring at the door as I could feel the hope slowing dissipating until the pathetic reality set in and I was left standing alone, hopeless. It never angered me though. And as I sit in here with her lifeless body in my hands, I wonder if it was even her safety I was worried about. Or did I just want to make sure that if the poison in her got to her, that I would be there for her to make some sort of deathbed apology that would make this hell worth it? At this point I didn’t know what any of it meant. My head was spinning. I felt rage. I felt sadness. I felt guilt. Pain. Fear. I felt…

Those icy blue eyes. They rolled back. My hands were on fire from squeezing so hard.



She was gone. This was what was supposed to happen. This was finally her way out.



Or was it mine?




Cynthia wasn’t always a strung-out mess. By no means was she a choir girl when I met her, but she had the type of smile that hipster crooners wrote toe-tapping tunes about. She was fiercely loyal, smart as a whip and had an absolute radiance about her that shined so brightly in a world with so much darkness. And those icy blue eyes.

I don’t know if there’s such a thing as perfection, but I do know that nothing in this world could ever come closer.

And I ruined it.

For everything that she was, I was the exact opposite: Spoiled, selfish, destructive. I wish I could say that I wasn’t the stereotypical rebellious child of an upper middle class family, smoking weed and hanging with the wrong crowd just to get back at my parents for...giving me everything I asked for. I wish Cynthia could’ve seen it, because none of this would’ve happened. She could’ve seen exactly how I got what I wanted and immediately turned around and spit it right back in people’s faces. Maybe if she saw me for the real me, she would’ve turned her nose up at me and never gave me a second look. She would’ve gone right on living her perfect little life and I would’ve been content hanging out behind Chipotle with the boys, getting high and wasting my life away.

But life is never that fair, and I’ll never forget the day that I first saw those icy blue eyes. We didn’t quite hit it off immediately, she seemed too prissy to me and I was too rough around the edges for her. It would be months of slowly stripping away our mutual dislike for each other before I saw the real her, and I became captivated. My every thought, every action, was done with her mind. To call it an obsession was too simple. It was more than that. We became intertwined on a level that shouldn’t have been humanly possible: If humans do indeed have souls, she became mine.

But I was no saint, and soon my flaws became hers. It started off innocently enough, introducing her to the type of fun that I had been having since middle school. A little weed never hurt me, why should it hurt her? But, it escalated. They always talked about it being a ‘gateway’ drugs and I always just laughed it off. But it was different for her. Soon she wanted to go to parties every night, and when I was too tired or too busy she’d grow visibly angry. She got high as soon as she woke up, and she made sure she stayed that way until she eventually passed out. Her radiance dimmed, her smile twisted, and those icy blue eyes were dilated and bloodshot. I knew she moved onto harder things, but I didn’t want to admit it; partially because I didn’t want to think that such a perfect creature was capable of such a fall from grace, but mostly because I knew that it was my fault.

The first time I caught her was the hardest. She had lost her job and fell out with her family, so she stayed with me. We fought constantly, to the point that anything that was breakable that she could lift, wound up shattered on the floor. And to my end, there were times where the back of my hand came dangerously close to smacking the side of her face. And then one day she was gone, without a trace. It forced me to come to grips with what she had become. Her dealer frequented the same hole-in-the-wall bar, peddling bags of ecstasy in the men’s bathroom. I found him, hoping he had seen her, yet when he told me that she had paid him a visit looking for heroin but was turned away because she didn’t have the money, my heart sank. My blood began to boil when he revealed that he sent her to another dealer friend of his to ‘work’ for the drugs. He coughed up the address fairly quickly after I plunged a knife into his throat. I missed everything vital purely by accident, but it turned out to be one hell of an interrogation technique. I entered the house and made my way upstairs, following the unmistakable sounds of Cynthia’s moaning. With every step I took, my stomach turned and my heart skipped a beat. I peered through the door and every violent, twisted thought I’ve ever had rushed back to me. As I watched her on top of him, needle sticking out of her arm, I thought to myself: How dare he. Completely lost on me was the fact that this was all her doing, but I was determined to make him pay for it. I lunged in the door with a bloodthirsty yell. She was too high to realize what was happening and simply slid off onto the floor, still wrapped in her momentary bliss.

“Wha” he tried to interject, but as I plunged my knife into his throat the only sound he made was a gurgling noise. This time, I didn’t miss the vitals. I stayed for a moment, staring down at the blade, quite unsure of what just happened. Cynthia slowly peeled herself from the ground and slumped over into my lap. She looked up at me and managed a smile, and I could see my panicked reflection in those icy blue eyes. Only now does it dawn on me that I wasn’t panicked about what happened, but it was because I knew in that moment that I had lost her forever.

And here I sit, in this dark alley with her lifeless body cradled against my own. She’s gone now. And when her body gets picked up a day or two from now, the coroners are just going to see some dead, worthless junkie who finally got what was coming to her. Her family won’t be notified, she won’t have a funeral service, nobody is going to shed a tear for her.



Except for me. And it’s all my fault.


“Hey! I know you! You’re John Blaq!” a voice rings out.


“Yeah, I’m John Blaq.”

“But you don’t fucking know me.”

I slouch back against the wall, knowing that my story has only just begun.

G-rated XWF megastar.