Rekindling Words


Recovering the Reflection nearly killed him.  It had been worse than previous collections, as it wasn't the last poem written
that had taken the most.  It had been the first poem, the first time he started writing again and knew he was back on that
same worn path.  It was possible to write until one's fingers bled, and such a phenomenon was familiar to Noel.  It was not
uncommon to write as red stained the pages, even as words stained his mind until washed away by pen, pencil or whatever
writing implement Noel happened to have on hand.

It was the first poem, the one called Recovering the Reflection, (as the first line was such), that left him in a cheap hotel for
three weeks.  He woke up later with a hangover and needle tracks up his arms, the poem written in soap on the bathroom
mirror.  It had taken him another day to rewrite the poem in one of his tattered notebooks, adding the wrapper from the
slim bar of hotel soap to the page and another hit of heroin.

It was the first poem that had unearthed the carefully buried memories within his mind, the past that could only be
remembered in poetry, and even then it usually took the last poem to accomplish that.  That final high and string of
sleepless nights and screaming days that left him wrung out and barely able to see the words torn out of his veins.  
Bleeding across the paper.

Noel added a final brushstroke to the painting, lightening the edge of the woman's arm and her reflection in the mirror, as
he remembered the last time he nearly died.  And how he was coming close to writing again, the words crowding his mind
until not even paint could cover them up.  He was going to bleed again, and this time he might bleed to death.  He had
known ever since he had started writing poetry that one time he might finally tumble off that edge, that crumbling precipice
that kept him between death and life, a cliff built of words and barricaded by paint and canvas.

"A precipice built of glass that only shines with the light of its own glory and demise," Noel murmured softly.

He stared at the painting for several minutes, before selecting a small fine-tipped brush and carefully painting the sentence
in crimson across his forearm.  He patiently waited for it to dry, scrutinizing the way the words rippled over the scars and
dripped lines of red down his pale skin.  Like writing with the juice of cherries, the tears of apples and the last vestiges of
daylight.  It was bright and vivid, illuminating his arm with rich red sunlight and words.  Not blood, it was too bright for
blood, full of life and a vivaciousness that he never associated with blood.

Blood was always an end, something slowing down the heart and draining away vigor as it slid down his arms and dripped
to the floor.

Noel left the small studio, holding his arm out stiffly as he mulled over the words, rolling them over in his head and watching
the way they tumbled and fell about in red letters and bright crimson notes.  It rang true; he decided it was a good start.  
There was a fresh, new notebook in his room.  He had bought it last week on a whim; he already had more than enough
notebooks.  Some filled, some empty, and some only half-written and half-torn with tape and pen drawings scattered
throughout.  It was if something inside of him had known that he would need this brand new one, crisp and clean, waiting
for this moment.  The moment he started writing again, and sent himself down spiraling back down into that same pit that
had taken him months to crawl out of.

Pushing back errant curls of dark brown hair from his eyes, Noel began to write the first line down in the notebook, small
words of deep blue scrawled against the pristine white blue-lined paper.  And then another line, and another, winding about
each other as they lazily crawled onto the page.  Words that came with each breath, and each heartbeat, and each biting
pain.  Noel rubbed his arms, lingering over the scars in the bend of elbows, needle marks.  The pain was stronger there.

He knew something that could block that pain, numb the images and memories that came to life within his mind with each
word written upon the page.

Noel carefully tucked the notebook and pen underneath one arm, slipping his wallet into his pocket, and went out to buy the
necessary supplies.  He had started writing poetry again, and there were things he needed to do first, things he needed to
buy.

Pens.

              Paper.

                             Needles.
 
                                                Heroin.

                                                                     ***

"What are you up to?" Alice smiled brightly as she shut the door softly and carefully behind her.  She had known Noel long
enough to have become familiar with his almost obsessive need for 'quiet' doors.

Noel looked up briefly, smiling faintly at her before returning to his notebook.  He had dealt with slamming doors in his
childhood, and appreciated the care Alice took with indulging his idiosyncrasy.  She never knocked either, loud knocking was
right underneath slamming doors in his book, and she never needed to either.  Alice was welcomed to come and go as she
pleased, a privilege and a precaution.

"Not much."  Noel made another attempt at a more genuine smile.

Alice was not fooled.  She sat next to him on the floor, folding up her long legs beneath her as she leaned against the wall
and touched his shoulder gently.  Concern had filled her pale thin face, and she was staring at his notebook, the words
scrawled across the pages, and his bare arms with the telltale marks in the bend of his elbow.  Red needle marks, red
words, and rusted smears across the margins of the pages.

"You've started again."  Alice shook her head slowly, her large luminous sea-green eyes fixed upon him, searching his face
and eyes.  "Jesus, Noel... "

She trailed off into silence, turning away to stare at her hands, her own arms and the past written upon them in scars and
needle trails.  They were very alike in many ways.  In the history they shared, the scars, the memories and tears that kept
them together.  They were also very different, like night and day.  Both sharing the sky; but while one was the brightness
of sunlight across the clear blue heavens, the other had retreated to a dark moonless, starless expanse of black.

"Alice..." Noel began, clenching his hands as he searched for the right words to say, struggling to keep from scratching out
more words across the pages, his skin and arms.  "It's... it's not that bad this time."

"The last time nearly killed you," she said, wiping at her eyes and smudging the carefully applied black eyeliner and green
eye-shadow across her cheeks.  "Fuck, we've been through this.  You don't need to destroy yourself each time you write."

"Uh huh," Noel mumbled, words flitting across his vision to obscure Alice's luminous eyes.

"Have you eaten today?"

Noel shook his head, crossing out one line on the page and writing in a couple stanzas, his eyes following the pen as it
spiraled across the page, tying words and lines together into the beginnings of a poem.  He didn't hear Alice leave, and
could only vaguely recall the sense of warmth beside him disappearing as she went into the kitchen to fix some food.

"Memories formed of flesh and blood can never survive the onslaught of time.  Decay, rot, and death overtake even the
most vivid recollection."  Noel paused, closing his eyes as a tumult of images cascaded through his head, memories that had
survived the years and defied death.  "But memories that scorn mortality escape the years and slip within the twilight.  
There is no day or night, only the image of that one moment forever carved of stone and burned in flames."

The ones that not even time can erase, the ones that nearly destroyed him last time.  A reflection that nearly cost me my
life to recover, he scribbled over a few words as his thoughts scrawled across his mind in illegible sentences and phrases,
was it worth it?

He already knew the answer, and it was no longer a question at this point.  A musing, something his mind would repeat and
throw about in vain; the answer had already taken away any emotion or fear over that particular thought.

Was it worth it?  The words echoed in his mind, reached through the past and reverberated in another's voice.

"Was it worth it?"  Alice's voice cracked as she wrapped her arms around him, trying to stop his shaking, the shivers that
threatened to tear apart his thin frame.

Noel gritted his teeth through the pain, the cold chills that swept through his body.  Alice was warm and soft, her body
like a blanket around him, a rock to hold onto, a roof to shelter him from the relentless storm that was his own rebelling
body.  The heroin leaving it, his very blood screaming in rage at the loss.  He closed his eyes, huddling closer to her...

The memory of cold, of pain and words written with needles and withdrawal left Noel shivering.  He rubbed his arms; tore
out several sheets of paper filled with words and the past, and crumbled them up until the memory was gone.  Reduced to
ripped paper and smudged words.

"I'm making spaghetti," Alice called from the kitchen, her bright voice intruding on his dark thoughts.  "Is that alright, or
would you like something else?"

Noel managed to answer her this time; the words had left him for the moment.

"Spaghetti is fine... but don't put olives in the sauce."

Alice laughed.  "No olives, since you have no taste."

Black letters flickered back into his vision, words slid back into his mind.  The memories were speaking, demanding
attention.  Noel pushed them aside for Alice, knowing that he would suffer for it later.  The consequences of denying the
words this moment would be high, but he had to be with Alice now.  Sentences slipped away into the darkness, and Noel
slowly made his way to the kitchen to his friend.  His comfort, his safety, his only sanity and anchor to this world.

                                                                      ***

Within the darkness there were only letters.  And red, and needles, and a strange pain along his knuckles.  His hand, his
hand hurt and Noel was dimly aware of something warm and wet running across his knuckles.  The floor was cold beneath
his body, hard and damp.  Noel opened and closed his eyes a couple times, trying to figure out where he was.  The
darkness remained, unwavering and thick around him.  As if he lay in a cave, pitch black and far from sunlight.  As if he was
back in the closet, the cold cramped space his mother would lock him in for the slightest and often times imagined offense.

Noel slowly rolled onto his side and managed to push himself upright.  Even in the dark his vision swam and swayed,
shadows dancing across his eyes and inside his head.  He had to rest for several minutes, breathing in and out, reminding
himself to breathe slowly and to keep breathing.  Closing his eyes and counting to ten forwards and backwards, numbers
sometimes helped.  Sometimes they even kept the words at bay.

Getting to his feet proved to be more difficult.  His hands managed to find a wall, a smooth hard surface that supported
him as he stood up.  The darkness was beginning to choke him, and Noel slid his hands across the wall in search of a light
switch.  Every time he moved a step, something crunched and chimed beneath his feet, musical pieces that sounded like
fallen stars being crushed beneath his shoes.

When he flicked on the light switch, he discovered that he was in the bathroom.  The pain in his right hand seemed to flare
at the onslaught of harsh light.  The mirror was broken, cracks radiating across the room and fracturing his face.  There
was blood on the mirror, and numerous cuts across the knuckles of his right hand.  He had punched the mirror again.

"Dammit," Noel swore softly as he ran water over the still bleeding cuts.

At least it was his bathroom.  He hadn't left his home, or the words hadn't pushed him to leave yet.  There were words on
the mirror, written in red.  Lipstick... probably Alice's.  She had a tendency to leave things whenever she visited.  The words
were smeared and broken, unusable for his purpose and memories.  Which had probably led to the shattered mirror in the
first place.  Noel started to sweep up the broken glass, but his limbs had started to shake, and the bathroom had become
unbearably cold.  He couldn't fix this...

Was it worth it?

"Was it worth it?!"  The harsh voice screamed.  His mother's voice.

Noel shrank further into himself, smaller now, younger.  Eight years old and his mother said he had lied.  He hadn't, he
hadn't told a lie.  He had told the truth, but he was damned anyway.  Damned for anything he did, damned for being
born.  The pain was nothing compared to the fear, the terrifying fact that he was going to die for nothing.  That he was
nothing, and there was nothing he could do.  Helpless, a bird with a broken wing, fragile bones being smashed and
broken, blood decorating the walls.  Screams, his, hers, and the dark, dark closet swallowing him up, the door slamming
shut and locked in his face.

Noel found the lipstick, frantically scrawling the words across the wall before his hands became useless.  He was shivering,
and soon the lipstick fell from his weak and trembling fingers.  Noel bit back a groan, and held onto the sink.  The words
pushing him against the wall and roaring through his veins.  Words sliced into the walls, spread across the wall in front of
him in shaking red letters.

Was it worth it?

He was too cold to think, to even move.  Noel laughed weakly as he sank to the floor, reaching for the lipstick again,
laughing and crying as it rolled from his fingers.  It took several tries to pick it up, to write across his arms in red and
needles.

"Give me the sun," Noel mumbled, writing sunlight across his arms in red and warm words that wrapped themselves across
his pale skin.

Closing his eyes, Noel let the lipstick fall.  Pieces of glass were slipping through his clothes and shoes, sliding into his skin
and replacing his blood with shattered bits of pain.  Then even that stopped, and there was only coldness.  Noel let the
words on his arms fill his mind, embracing those lines as his final thoughts, warmth and sunlight.  Warmth and sunlight
spreading across his arms and filling his body, covering his skin with heat and golden brilliance.

It was warm.

Noel's eyes snapped open at the heat, light pouring into the room and into his head.  It had gotten bright, too bright.  
Vivid light filled the small bathroom, and heat slid over his body with a familiar and welcoming touch.  Like the embrace of a
lover, the comfort of a parent.  Like Alice, sliding her arms around him and keeping him from the dark.

The sunlight followed him into the darkness.

                                                                     ***

"Noel... Noel."

Alice's voice pulled at him.  The darkness receded and gave way to her face, that familiar face that Noel had seen so many
times.  It was funny to think that you could look at someone's face every day, and yet never actually see that face... her
face.  With the large, slightly tilted sea green eyes in a pretty heart-shaped face, framed by that mass of strawberry blond
curls.  Her make-up was streaked across her cheeks, obscuring the faint dusting of freckles that normally stood out against
her pale skin, and her eyes were red and puffy from crying, and even more tears were beginning to brim over.

"Noel, what happened?"  Alice wiped a damp washcloth across his face, smiling at him even though her own eyes were wide
with fear.

Noel smiled back weakly.  "I was writing."

"I can see that."  Alice helped him sit up, fear leaving her eyes to be replaced by something warmer.  "Fuck, Noel, why do
you have to do this?"

"You keep asking me that," Noel laughed, a frail bitter sound that managed to frighten him.  "It's like clockwork.  I fuck
myself up, and you ask why."

Alice handed him the washcloth, averting her eyes to stare up at the broken mirror.  "Your nose is bleeding..."  Her voice
had become very small.  "When you're done cleaning yourself up, I'll fix you some food."

"Alice..." Noel tried to speak, his voice shattering as words clogged his mind and gagged his mouth.  His hand flopped limply
at his side, refusing to obey as he tried to touch her arm, tried to hold her and keep her with him.

The door shut softly behind her, and the room became very dark.  Cold.  Noel shivered, and tried to get up.  It took several
tries, the light in the room seemed to wax and wane with every movement.  Dimming, then growing a bit brighter.  But
never bright enough, never light enough for him.

The mirror was still shattered, smashed by his own hand.  Noel stared blearily at his reflection for several long minutes,
watching the cracks crawl along his face and seep into his skin.  The broken mirror was the only bright thing in the
bathroom, along with the vivid crimson blood on his face.

"Broken again," Noel murmured to the mirror and himself.

Words marched in red across his vision as he washed his face.  They swirled down the drain in pink-tinted water and left a
stain across the white porcelain and his mind.  There were words across his arm; large red letters sprawled across his skin
in lazy lines.

Sunlight.

Warm and bright.

Noel frowned as he read the few hastily written stanzas on his arm.  Words of sunlight, warmth and golden brilliance.  For
one brief second the words in red were illuminated by bright beaming light.  Sunlight.  It was enough to block all the words
in his head, the ones tumbling through his throat and racing through his veins.  The ones that kept his mind locked away,
and his mouth sewn shut in tight neat sutures.

He rubbed at the words, his mind stumbling about in the fleeting sunrise that had illuminated the inside of his head and
every dark and shadowed corner.  Something hadn't survived that glimpse of dawn; something had faded within the
morning light.  Something had cracked and crumbled, a wall, a barrier had given way to whatever the words on his arm had
conjured.

He was afraid.

With the fear the sunlight faded, and the words roared back into his head and body.  The bathroom was dim again, a frigid
darkness that pressed against his chest and left a sheen of cold sweat on his skin.  Noel washed the words off of his arm
slowly, watching the red letters fade from his skin and body.

Alice had finished cooking supper by the time he was done.  The scent of good warm food managed to fill his apartment
with a tangible sense of comfort, contentment that could be seen, felt and tasted.  It was soup, escarole with chicken
broth, garlic and rosemary.  Alice was fond of putting portabella mushrooms in hers, and her version was his favorite.

Even the scent of something so familiar and welcome wasn't enough to banish the words.  They demanded his attention,
screamed for it in broken sentences and disconnected verbs that ran and pushed their way through his head.  The poetry
had taken on an edge of anxiety, of fear and haste.  Something had happened in the bathroom, something written in
sunlight.

"Come and eat your soup before it gets cold," Alice said as she set out a bowl for him.

Noel forced himself to pick up the spoon, trying to quell the faint tremble that ran through his hands.  "Thanks... for
everything."

Alice pulled up a chair next to him, taking his cold hands into her own and enveloping them with warmth and soft skin.  It
always amazed Noel how soft Alice's hands were, as if water had been given a more solid shape in the form of her skin.  The
shivering stopped, his own hands stilling beneath hers as his skin paused to take in the sensation and touch of her own.  
His fingers slowly relaxing within hers, touching the paper band around her wrist, touching the frail bones of her wrists that
had begun to push out more conspicuously against her paper thin skin.

"You don't have to do this," Alice whispered.  "You can escape."

"I'm not as strong as you."

Alice squeezed his hands and smiled.  "It's not a matter of strength."  Her voice acquired a hard edge, though the smile
never faded.  "It's a matter of will; do you want to get through this?"

Noel gently extracted his hands from her grip, unable to face her, unable to look into her eyes and see that question.  "You
know I do... I don't enjoy dealing with these... these fucked up memories... our past."

"I know you don't enjoy this.  The only thing that you need to think about is whether you truly want to get through this."  
Alice shook her head, saying, "We went through the same shit together.  Both of us on the streets taking care of each
other."  She held out her arms, showing the needle trails, the same as his.  "I want to live...do you?"

The words grabbed his hands and tied his mouth shut in tight knots and stuttering thoughts.  Noel nodded slowly, even as
his eyes slipped away from hers and fell back down into the abyss formed of words and stanzas.  Reflections of his own
broken face and mind repeated endlessly around him, inside him, framed in words.

                                                                     ***

It was brighter the next day, warmer, as if the words written the day before on his arms had been taken by the sun above.  
Bleeding into the sky and blanketing the ground with rays of light and warmth.  Noel sat on the stoop outside of his home,
a small penthouse brought with the money that people gladly paid for his poetry.  The stories of his heroin addiction and
the pain and agony every word cost him gained even more money.  More notoriety for the young brilliant poet on the brink
of destruction, killing himself with his own hands, his own words.  Noel had no doubt that after his death, and most likely it
would be an untimely and fast approaching death, the prices on his poems would skyrocket.  Fame for the talented, the
scarred, and the dead.

"Broken by his art, it was the only salvation left," Noel mumbled half to himself, half to the tattered notebook in his hands.  
Three days, and already it was torn and battered, filled with scribbles and shattered poems.  "Tearing out his heart, he was
left with only carvings of a beating wound.  A silent pulse, an etching of pumping blood and slashed veins."

He tapped the end of his pen against the wrinkled pages in thought, watching the sun beam down on the streets, the cars,
and the people.  All the trappings and noise of a city.  Holier, a city known for its perpetual 'darkness', a city of night and
poets.  Poe would have been at home here, Noel had been simply born here out of accident, literally.  A city of poets, and
here was a poet who wished he was a thousand miles away.

"A thousand steps up and down, below Hell and above Heaven.  Before the loss of a heart and soul meant damnation or
faith in cynicism and ladders."  Noel rubbed the bend of his elbow, the familiar ache starting just beneath the skin and
writhing its way toward his hand.  "To map every step meant to count ever drop of blood and every pen mark in the book
of life and the pages lost to the inferno.  His art, his words split the arteries wide open, rent the sky and left only the
bleeding heavens and convulsing underworld."

Pigeons had begun to gather on the sidewalk in front of him, strutting back and forth in aimless paths.  Babbling to
themselves and to him as he wrote his own inane rants down in pen, paper, and the glass shards that still moved through
his veins.  Mindless gibberish, only he had the good sense to disguise it with pretty words and similes, aureate descriptions
of what was really a simple matter.  Broken glass was broken glass.  Only some people called it by what it was, others...
poets... artists would call it a statement in sound and light, a myriad of netted reflections, a host of other sentences and
rhymes to describe an accident.  A mistake.

One pigeon thrashed upon the concrete, frantic movements that betrayed the broken wing.  Flailing from side to side as it
tried desperately to take to the air; it gradually made its way to Noel, stumbling against the steps with the frenzied motions
of the doomed.  Noel watched the bird for a few minutes, wondering if he should do anything, wondering if there was
anything he could do.  His own cynicism, born and bred by the city, had already condemned the pigeon.  Pigeons die every
day, there were thousands of them and the loss of one pigeon meant nothing.

Yet part of him focused on the image of the bird trying to fly with a broken wing, his own lungs tightening until it became
hard to breathe.  Death, dying while struggling to escape the inevitable, was a familiar and frightening idea.  He had tried for
years to escape, tried to fly with his own shattered wings that weighed him down, failed him.  The bird's movements and
plight took on more than just a singular event, more than just this one moment that had happened numerous and
countless times before.  It was him, he was scrabbling on the sidewalk, one wing beating the air while the other scraped
uselessly across the rough concrete, chest heaving, heart pounding, brain screaming, Why?!

Noel bit his lip as nausea rose in his stomach, pressing his hand against his chest to try and slow down his frantically racing
heart.  His own arm ached painfully, his own broken wing dragging him toward death.  The pigeon staggered closer,
feathers drifting loose to dot the sidewalk like downy clots of blood.  Hemorrhaging its life of flight as it died.  Noel's hand
was trembling as he lifted up the pen again, bending down to his paper and words.

The memory of the bathroom, the sunlight hit his mind like a hammer, shocking his eyes wide open as heat filled his body
with one brief flash.  The sunlight left as quickly as it came, but the words that had conjured it remained.  Sliding across his
mind in slow golden letters that began to burn in lighter colors.  Pale blues, silver and white.  Colors of winds, zephyrs and
skies.  The hue of flight and flying, fluttering in his mind like beating wings.

"Flight," Noel whispered as his own pen rasped against the paper and wrote flight.

Words of flight, of flying and feathers flew across the page in letters and lines of blue that twisted across the page before
fading away.  He filled up half the page before the words left him, the wings filling his head slowing down to a dim memory.  
Noel gasped for breath, his arms aching, his lungs pushing against iron bands, and his body weary beyond belief.  And even
in that profound weariness there was a sense of relief, calm seeping into his veins and blunting the edges of the shards of
glass.  He closed his eyes as he slumped over his notebook, feeling as if he could sleep for once.  Sleep peacefully; sleep the
whole night without a single nightmare or pain.

A soft musical thrill filled his ears.  Noel opened his eyes to see the broken wing pigeon standing still, looking straight at him
as it uttered that strange melodic noise of flutes and pipes that he had never heard from a pigeon, or any other bird.  
Slowly it stretched both wings, both wings flaring wide in a picture of grace and health.  Its pure white feathers caught the
sunlight and reflected rainbows, the myriad of colored prisms racing through its plumage and unfolding the feathers back
into feathery banners, ribbons of light and silver radiance.  Its bright blue eyes pierced Noel's own dark stare, its musical
song filling the air like sunlight.  Then the bird that had once been a broken-winged pigeon flew away.

The world came back into focus, the throbbing ache in his arm spreading to his heart with insistent and raw need.  Noel
pushed away the protests and harsh screams his blood made for a fix, waiting until his fingers had started to dig into the
palms of his hands.  Waited until the words came roaring back into his head and crowded out the image of the bird.  
Drowned out its song with needles and broken glass.  Only then did he slowly and painstakingly made his way to his feet,
and went back inside.  Convinced that he had begun to go insane.

                                                                     ***

"You're not losing your mind," Alice said firmly, putting aside her guitar gently, the strings humming slightly at the
movement.

Noel stared down at his hands, his fingers picking at the frayed edges of his t-shirt, toying with the silver ring on his hand
that forever remained too loose, and picking at ragged fingernails.  Anything to keep his mind occupied, to keep him from
looking at her.  The assurance and soothing confidence in her voice did nothing to dispel the cold fear that he had finally
gone insane.

"You didn't see it..." Noel muttered, wrapping his arms around himself, trying to keep himself in place and whole.  "Fucking
pigeon turned into some kind of... of phoenix or something..."

Alice sighed.  "You're not crazy. You're tired, over-worked, stressed, not to mention addicted to heroin.  I mean, look at
you.  You've been barely eating these last couple weeks, barely sleeping, shooting up all the time.  You've lost weight,
you're killing yourself, but you aren't going crazy."

"How do you know?"

Alice shrugged, jotting down another bar of notes and chords in her songbook, the thin strip of paper and names around
her wrist sliding up and down her arm with the slightest movement.  "If anything is going on, it's the heroin.  It could be
the lack of sleep, which can cause hallucinations."

Noel laughed bitterly, surprised and frightened by the anger that had begun to surge inside him, knotting his hands into
tight fists.  "I'm hallucinating, but I'm not crazy."

"Remember all the crazy shit we used to see on the streets?" Alice's own voice had taken on a sharp edge.  "Remember
that time I thought that your face was that of a dead person, and that the windows were melting?"

Her words burst into images in his head, bright scathing pictures and faces that exploded like fireworks and sprays of
florescent blood across his mind.  Memories of cold nights on the streets, searching for abandoned buildings to sleep in,
searching for new ways to get more heroin.  Alice turned to prostitution, and eventually Noel did too... pride was nothing
when you had to have another fix.  The anger seeped away at the memories, the words that were tied to his past and
those hated memories of doing anything, becoming nothing just to shoot up once more.

Pride was nothing, he became nothing but addiction.  Nothing but need, nothing but self-loathing and complete and utter
hatred for the way the body turned on itself when there wasn't a needle in sight.  Hatred for the almost painful relief that
came every time he shot up.  Nothing had changed; even the method of gaining money for his addiction was still the same.  
Still a whore, selling his body, selling his art and pieces of his soul, selling himself over and over again for the fix.  The anger
was gone; Noel wasn't even sure why he had been angry in the first place.  All that was left was him, cold and alone,
trembling slightly as he gritted his teeth and tried to keep the shivers from becoming worse.  Alice would notice then, she
would notice the way he kept rubbing his arm, and the pained expression that pinched his face and kept his hands tight in
his lap.

"I remember..." Noel said softly, words shuffling and rearranging themselves like cards, jabbing at him like needles.  "I
remember that time when you got cut up by a... customer... and you couldn't call the police.  We couldn't call the police,
because why would they care?  Why would they care that a couple of whores had gotten hurt... one less pest to worry
about... like pigeons.  No one cares when pigeons die... no one cares when hookers get killed."

"Noel."  Alice reached over and hugged him tightly, her own body as warm and bright as the sunlight he had briefly
summoned in the bathroom... a hallucination, but a beautiful one.  "We're past that.  We survived it; you don't have to
keep living as if you're still on the streets, still blowing guys for money.  You're going to finish what those men tried to do
to, what your mother tried to do."

Noel winced.  "You survived, you got past it.  I... I'm still breaking mirrors because I can't stand to look at myself."

"You could get past it, if you let yourself.  You're an artist; you could be using your art to help you through this.  Instead
you use it to destroy yourself."  Alice rubbed his back, confusion and pain entering her voice, her arms becoming stiff.  "I
don't understand why you insist on trying to kill yourself.  You survived all that shit, only to give up now."

"Art is all about destroying yourself.  The artist smashing apart something, someone, then presenting the pieces to the
world."  Noel wrapped his own arms around her slim frame, gently rubbing her shoulders and trying to carefully massage
the stiffness out of her muscles and back without bruising her.  "I'm trying to tear down my past, you know."  He paused,
and closed his eyes as the memories returned, reinforced with steel words and iron letters.  "You know, I just can't keep
it... inside... all the time.  I let it out and it tries to eat me, even as I'm trying to shatter it, explain it and understand it in
some way that won't burn me from the inside out."

"You don't have to destroy the past in order to live with it."

"I can't live with it."

"You have to, otherwise it will demolish you."  Alice pulled away, picking her guitar back up, moving slowly with painstaking
care.  She strummed a few chords, then looked up and said, "You know, you focus too much on death and destruction.  
Art is also about life; it's about creating something and giving the world something new."

Noel smiled.  "You make it sound hopeful."

"Sometimes that's all you can do," Alice smiled back.  "Be hopeful."

                                                                     ***

The painting hadn't changed.  Noel leaned against the wall in his studio, his muscles aching and weak, his eyes fixated on
the canvas he had left.  The first day he had started poetry, the last day he had worked on this painting.  This portrait of a
woman, looking at her reflection in the mirror, her face framed in glass and light.  A painting of Alice.

It wasn't complete, and wouldn't be finished until Noel was done writing and ready to try and recover.  Ready to put aside
the words and to try and forget, to try and use art in the manner Alice had told.  Trying to create something new, trying to
paint life and to paint life back into him.  If Noel managed to survive this time, because Alice was right.  This time was worst;
he knew it as soon as he had painted those first words across his arm.  This time would be the last, this time he wouldn't
escape the words, and he wouldn't escape his past.  It would swallow him whole, art destroying the artist.

His eyes followed the shadows across the canvas, the flesh tones that made up Alice's skin, Alice body and Alice's face
painted in loving detail.  Alice's eyes in the mirror, reflected back to herself and to him.  Noel shivered as the temperature
dropped another couple degrees in the studio, the light dimmed further and the darkness encroaching his vision moved in
closer to the center of his sight and mind.

There was sunlight in the painting, just as he had written sunlight in the mirror.  He had written something new, created
something with his words.  His words had recreated that pigeon outside in the bright sunlight.  He had written about
healing and about flight, and in the course of healing the bird had changed it.  Shaped it into something new.  A phoenix
rising from the ashes of his words.  Some part of Noel that had accepted these events as real recognized that using
words... magic to only alter a small part of the whole, would always recreate the whole.  You couldn't touch something with
magic, and expect it to stay the same.

Just as he had been changed the first time the sunlight had burst into being, and the new words had raced through his
veins and fingertips.  Words of creation, as opposed to words of death and destruction.  Both made up poetry, both made
up art.  Both were two sides of a coin.  But he had dwelt too long on one side, and people... artists weren't made to only
linger on one side of the scale.  Opposites, balances existed for the good of the whole.  And a whole couldn't remain healthy
when it was only half.

He couldn't live if he only wrote of death, destruction.

He was writing his own death, using these words to kill himself.

It had taken him years to figure it out, years of Alice him telling it to his face over and over again.  He was killing himself.  A
slow suicide, slicing his wrists open with words and swallowing poison letters until he threw up blood.  Pumping his veins full
of heroin and the false belief that he was doing this to save himself.  For some it took only six days to create a universe, six
days to look upon the words that had created the world and to see the good of it all.  While Noel took years to slowly
destroy himself by his own hands and words, years of trying to redeem himself and to find something worth saving.

And he saw this, and it was far from good.  It was fucked up.  It was insane; he was spinning out of control.  He was dying.
 Noel slumped further toward the floor, toward the end of his short but brilliant career as an artist, a fucked up poet who
fucked himself over and over again.  Who had let guys fuck him for money to buy drugs, to buy his crippled wing, the
broken weight that kept dragging him from the sky and condemned him to death.  He was falling from the sky, falling into
the dark closet of his childhood where his mother waited, and those men waited, and a thousand needles waited to line his
bed and muffle his screams.

The sunlight, the broken winged pigeon that had become something beautiful, a phoenix, all of that couldn't save him.  He
had discovered something wondrous, something magical and pure and far from the horrible suffocating darkness of his
past.  Words of creation... but they only worked if he was willing to use them.  Now that he knew them, he couldn't
accidentally invoke them again.  That was the way magic, art and life worked.  Once you became aware of what you were
doing by accident, it took resolve and conscience effort to do it again.  Things he was severely lacking.

It didn't matter anyway.  All that mattered finally being free of the cold and pain and the past.  The memories had won, he
was too tired to keep fighting anymore, and unwilling to let Alice suffer along with him... suffer for him because she was his
friend and friends shouldn't cause their friends pain.  Noel shivered and reached for the notebook and pen.  One page left
empty, and that was all he needed.  Beside him lay the syringe, the heroin as an extra guarantee.  If the words of
destruction, of death didn't work... then the heroin would.

Noel was certain the words would work.  And he didn't want to die of an overdose; he had come to close to that particular
demise many times.  He wanted to die free of the heroin anyway; he wanted that particular monster not to be the last thing
he felt, he saw as he died.  The words would be enough, they had to be.  They would be, he had picked the one poem that
had nearly killed him last time, Recovering The Reflection.  That one would work, this time he wouldn't fight it.

Slowly, carefully with an almost obsessive precision he wrote out the poem.  The lines were neat, his hand barely shook,
and a sense of calm and placid acceptance settled upon him.  Slowly the words sank into the pages like weights, stones that
would line his grave and hold his body down forever.  Stones to keep his soul broken, trapped and unable to reach the sky.

The phone jolted him out of his reverie before he was halfway done with the poem.  Noel glared at the ringing phone in
irritation, trying to figure out who was calling, and wondering if he should even pick it up.  The distance to the phone had
increased dramatically; it seemed as if he would have to walk for miles before reaching it.  Too much effort, he was too tired
to even try.  Noel sighed, leaning his head back against the wall as he closed his eyes.  The shrill ringing filled the studio,
vibrating inside his skull as the pain began to grow in his arms.

There was a click, his own voice telling the caller to leave a message, and then silence.  And crying.  Noel's eyes snapped
open, it was Alice.  It was painful to move, hard to get to his feet, but he managed to inch his way to an unsteady standing
position, braced against the wall as Alice finally regained control and began to talk.

"Noel... Noel," Alice sniffled, and then took a deep breath, trying to calm herself.  "I... I just got back from the doctor
today... it was... I'm sorry, but it looks as if you are going to be the one who survives."  Her voice shook, but gradually she
regained that same cheerful calm that had held them both together for so many years.  "It's okay, I... I'm going... I'm going
to give you my hospital room number... when you come, can you bring my guitar and songs?  I have a couple more I want
to write down before..."  Her voice broke, then steadied once more.  "It's not so bad.  Remember that movie... The Last
Unicorn?  How the wizard talked about there being no happy endings, because nothing ends.  Just because I'm not going
to be there, doesn't mean it's an end.  It's not an end for you... it's not exactly an end for me.  It's... it's a transition, a
change for the both of us.... different paths... separate ones."

Noel had to use both hands to hold himself up against the wall, both hands holding him to reality, to the sound of Alice's
voice as she told him goodbye.  His lungs were laboring for air, and the studio had begun to swim around him, Alice's
portrait dipping and swirling in the sea of shadows.

Alice took another deep breath, and said, "Nothing ends, Noel.  Things just change.  You just have to change with them."

There was a beep, and then she was gone.  Noel fell to his knees, his head against the wall as his fists pounded against the
smooth unyielding surface.  His breath coming out in deep wrenching gasps, eyes burning as he hit the wall over and over
again.  The memories, the words were blown away by the recent images of Alice.  Of Alice growing pale and thin, Alice
struggling to be strong for him as her own body slowly shut down.  Alice being eaten away from the inside out and he was
too caught up in his own shit.  Caught up in his self-loathing, his self-pity and self-hatred, his utter and complete
selfishness.

"Fuck... fuck," Noel groaned, punching the wall again until he could feel nothing in his hands and nothing in his heart but
pain.

He picked up the notebook and threw it across the room with a rough yell, watching the pages flutter like wings as it sailed
across the room to land in a table full of paints and brushes.  The pen soon followed it, and then Noel was on the floor,
curling up in a ball as it became harder and harder to breathe.  His stomach pushing its way into his throat, his eyes full of
hot sand and blood running down his knuckles.  Red blood to mirror the red paint that now stained the notebook.  Red to
mirror the roses in the picture of Alice, the red in her strawberry blond curls, the red of her blood that was now poison to
her body.

Was it worth it?

Alice had felt that he was worth it; he was worth her putting aside her own worries, her own illness to care for him.

Was she worth it?

Noel already knew the answer.  It was hard to get up, hard to find his feet and to find his bearings as his body fought him
and demanded a fix.  He kicked aside the syringe, swaying as he walked toward the door.  The words marched up the walls
and over his feet, trying to trip him up, trying to make him stumble and fall.  There were so many words, so many different
words.  Words of destruction, words of creation.  He just had to pick which ones to use; he had to want to use them.

She was worth it.

She was worth believing in something impossible.  She was worth accepting that he could do something, that how he had
gained the words and why they had come to him was not important.  The only thing that mattered was that he had them.  
Words of creation.  And he could use them, he would.

The studio door shut softly behind him, his demons following in a trail of broken letters and shrieking words.  Filling his
veins with lead as he went to see Alice.

                                                                     ***

Alice was asleep when he entered the hospital room.  It was cold; he was cold and shivering as he sat down beside her still
pale form.  Like a princess waiting for that magical kiss to awaken her.  Waiting for the rose to bloom, and for the spell to
shatter beneath love or whatever came close to it.  Waiting for the impossible, waiting for magic in a world that left no room
for such things.

Noel wasn't sure if he could call the words magic or not, if art were simply another means of sorcery.  Magicians and wizards
had used spells and potions, rhymes and chants to harness magic.  Perhaps art was another more modern way of capturing
magic, he had accidentally stumbled upon his own method of working and using magic.  Words... all he needed were words.  
The right words, it had to be the right ones.  And he needed the desire, the resolve to use them.  He had to do it right, he
had to want to do it right.

So much resting on so little.  Noel swallowed hard as he slid back into the uncomfortable chair by Alice's bed.  He settled his
notebook on his lap, a new one with a new pen.  A fresh start.  Slowly he began to write, tried to write.  Tried to regain
what he had done with the sunlight, the phoenix.  His pen slipped across the page, words fell and stumbled into one
another, and tears began to spot the paper and smear the ink.

"So stupid... fucking stupid," Noel swore softly as another word broke beneath his pen, his hands shaking with fear, hope,
and painful need.

Alice stirred on her bed, her own pain etching her face.  Noel held his breath until she settled back into drugged sleep,
medicines filling her veins and doing nothing.  Nothing but smoke and mirrors.  Noel bit his lip, one hand holding the other
and steadying it, trying to keep the pen and words straight.  The words shattered like glass, netted reflections and a
statement on how fucked up things were that he was trying to do magic to save his dying friend.

She was worth everything.

Noel took several deep breaths, in and out, counting to ten forwards and backwards.  He had used words of creation
before, he could use them again.  Noel let the memories of his past go, of his mother and those men and all those times he
had sat on the street and thought of killing himself.  He let the past go and all the words of destruction and pain that went
with them.  Letting go of his own self-absorption with pity, his inability to move past every wrong and hurt, moving past all
that towards forgiveness to everyone who had hurt him and to himself.  It didn't need a forceful hand to rid him of all the
pain and stagnant hatred, the sloth of despair was easier to move through when he stopped sinking and began walking.

With all of that gone, his mind and body was empty and ready to be filled with the words of creation and memories of the
new and better.  Memories of Alice.  Alice when she was healthy and whole.  Alice writing songs, Alice posing for him in his
studio, Alice cooking food, Alice watching TV with him, watching her favorite movie The Last Unicorn.

The memory of sunlight hit him harder this time; a burning fire that left scald marks on his fingers.  The memory of winds,
skies, and the song of the phoenix filled his ears, pushing back the flames far enough to let him write.  He could take the
words of fire, the words of wind and air.  Rekindling words, words of creation, words of Alice well and healthy, words of Alice
living and his own life wrapped together.

The words of creation bit his fingers, as if to admonish him for taking so long to realize it.  They filled the page perfectly,
sliding smoothly from the pen like silk and satin.  They blanketed Alice and seeped into her skin.  Moving into her blood with
warmth, breath, and life.  Creation.

Even as the words of creation moved through him and into Alice, Noel thought back to the words of his past.  The words
that had fought so violently against the new, the change and life itself.  Destruction, a way to destroy his past and all its
misery, a way to end his memories.  But Alice had been right, the wizard had been right.  There were no happy endings
because nothing ends.  He couldn't end his past, and in trying to destroy his past he had come close to destroying himself.

He couldn't change his past and his memories either.  All he could do was learn to live with what had happened, make a new
life for himself, change himself.  All there was in this very moment was change.  Immense and sweeping, recreating
everything until it was almost impossible to recognize anything from before.  The price of magic was always change; it left
no room for anything else.  Creation was the new, and recreation was change, and both went hand in hand.

Alice's eyes fluttered open, her breathing smooth and even as she turned her head and looked at Noel.  His own hands
were burned from the words; his own mouth was momentarily locked against any sound by what had happened.  The
words of creation slipped back inside of him, waiting for what would happen next.  He didn't know what would happen next,
or what changes had been wrought by his own immature and fumbling uses of magic and poetry.

Alice smiled at him, and Noel realized that it didn't matter what exactly had been altered and recreated within the fire, only
that there had been a rebirth and an opportunity to take to the skies again.  There was a faint pulse against his heart, the
words of creation reminding him that things couldn't go back to being the same.  Noel smiled at those words, smiled at
Alice, stood up and kissed her gently on the forehead.

"Have you ever wanted to see the Grand Canyon?" he said.

Jharice Blake

Recovering the reflection Has led to the one path a way Left behind shut doors In the dark for eight years by the way When I was finally permitted The windows were open an out Begging for forgiveness The doors were shut in my face I'm sorry She held back her hand Extended the sunlight the dark I can shatter a mirror Breaking into jagged edges myself