Veins

There are some people who blend beautifully into your life. That terrible beauty that takes over, and having taken over continues to grow algae-like over pools of once uncontaminated moments.

She was beautiful, no doubt. Her voice had the burst of freshness of freshly plucked mint on parched morning afters. And so she came into my life. I took her by hand into the freshly painted memories of my mind. She built and rebuilt the fractured fragments of my imagination as my skin itched, the purpled veins underneath growing darker. And she would brush her fingers over my furrowed brow, "it will all be alright", she said.

I watched as she picked up wooden frames, tilting, sawing edges, I helped her even with sand paper that razed my hand. I saw myself being innocuously shifted out of the refurbished frames. Quite inconspicuously at first, just an ear or a foot until it was hard to see that they were my frames at all.

And those purple veins grew thicker and longer over my swollen fingers. Stretching, spreading, spurting new tendrils, throbbing at the joints till they ached.

Finally, one day, I found a blade. What does it take to wash purple stains?