“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1982

It’s about a year ago from before and there’s a cloudy haze, although that could just be the fog outside. She was still new and quiet, keeping to herself mostly. Crossed legs and fuzzy headphones covering her ears, wired up to an outdated black-and-plastic Sony Walkman. Television, Patti Smith, The Ramones. Actual punk rock.

A few desks in front of her was laughter, it was Eliot looking down at his biology homework, though they hadn’t really met yet. Baby-pink stomach and ruby-red intestines. What was so funny about that, weirdo?

The boy then quickly snapped out of it when he heard his name, “Here!” he replied with eagerness. She didn’t even realize attendance was being taken. It seemed a bit elementary — if a student didn’t want to come to class at this point are you still going to call their parents? Not like hers could be called, anyways. But she didn’t even want to think about Eden getting the call instead.

A few moments passed. The science teacher looked down, a little confused as she called out “Er, Delilah Rainwater?”

The class in its entirety looked around. The name was unfamiliar, which of course was cause for commotion in such a shitty small town. Probably the most interesting thing happening all day. She was stuck in the far back, unnoticed until that moment, long dark hair and olive skin. Heavy mascara, long-sleeves, and tall leather-studded boots. Trying so hard to be effortless, and pretty without realizing it.

“It’s Naomi.” She replied in a low monotone, between the frankly obnoxious chewing of her bubble-gum, not even pulling her headphones down.

This made the figurehead at the front of the class pause for a moment, looking down at her paper with even more confusion. She was an old lanky sort of teacher, probably too old and Naomi didn’t even know her name.

“Are you sure? It says Delilah here.”

This made the girl tense up, both in irritation and anxiety. “I think I know what my own name is.” She already knew why she was being treated like this, but also knew she couldn’t comment on it.

“Okay, I’ll make a note of it, Delilah. Er, Naomi. Is that Nay-omi or Ni-omi?” The shrill voice called out.

This back-and-forth was followed by snickers throughout the class, which Naomi was sort of proud of. Though it then became obvious nobody seemed to want to put in the effort to try to engage with her, with such a different girl, they weren’t laughing with her. This made her lose her smile and feel a pit in her empty stomach. She made a mental note to hate this teacher for the rest of the year.

By the time that class ended, and lunch began all she could do is focus on trying to figure out where she could effectively hide, unlocking her locker with her headphones down — her Walkman already dead.

“Naomi, right?” That same eager voice asked from behind her.

“Oh, uh, yeah, that’s me. Eliot, right?” She replied with a weak attempt of a grin.

He nodded, giving her a genuine smile in return. “That was pretty funny. I don’t think Mrs. LaCombe is ever gonna have that stick. Hey, do you wanna hang with me and my friend during lunch?”

She paused and fought off the instinct to reject him outright, she had no real good reason to. Instead, she just nodded with a rather unenthusiastic agreement. Naomi followed him outside to the school’s abysmally tiny parking lot, tucked between a crevasse of the school, only about a dozen spots indicated by barely noticeable paint on washed-out concrete. It matched that day’s sky.

When she got there, she noticed an unfamiliar boy sitting lazily on top of the hood of an old red car. It looked like a 90’s era Pontiac Thunderbird, with sparkling rust right above the tires and passenger door.

“Hey, you’re that new Indian girl, right?” The boy asked rather casually as he lit up a joint, having trouble keeping the flame up with the autumn wind. She couldn’t quite pin him down yet.

Eliot blushed and winced before walking up to elbow him in the shoulder. “Shut up, you can’t say that kind of thing, idiot. She’s aboriginal.” A smug grin appeared on the boy’s sour-cream-colored face.

“No, he’s right. I’m Indian. I’m just not living on the reservation anymore.” Naomi aptly replied.

Milton grinned as he took his first successful toke. “Right on, see Eliot, not everybody has a stick up their ass.” Which was followed by another elbow to the shoulder, with Milton moving so Eliot had room to sit next to him on the hood, rolling his eyes at the other boy.

“Man, it’s only your first day of class and I already have so many questions for you.” Eliot remarked as he took the joint from Milton. “Why on Earth did you decide to move out here to Dogwood? And why do you go by Naomi? Oh, this is Naomi by the way, Milt.”

She paused again, awkwardly greeting herself and leaning up against the edge of the car. “It wasn’t really my choice, or anything — ”

“Hey, you wanna blow this popsicle stand and to go shoot shit and light stuff on fire?” She was abruptly cut off by Milton, who grinned widely as he pushed himself off the car and unlocked the doors.

“What? Are you nuts?!” Though she did feel a sense of relief at the subject change, she couldn’t help but think back again to Eden getting a call if she missed classes.

“By that, he just means that he’s gonna try to make empty beer cans fall off an old fence with a stolen BB gun and then start a lame bonfire after he misses too many times.” Eliot giggled as he explained. “Now come on, you’ll have to squeeze between us, Milt’s stupid car is only a two-seater.”

Naomi found herself trying her best to sit comfortably between the two taller boys on the makeshift leather interior. Fuck it, right? The inside of the car smelled like weed and bootleg Calvin Klein, it was surprisingly kind of nice. A black and silver rosary hung and dangled from the cracked rear-view mirror.

“Uh, fuck off, Eliot. It’s way cooler than that, I promise. He probably hasn’t told you yet but we’re actually part of the trench coat mafia.” Milton kept grinning as he started the car, having to move his long hair out of his face as he tried to exit the cramped parking lot without scratching against another car again.

Eliot tried to hit him, but it was pretty difficult with Naomi sitting between them. “Dude don’t even joke about that. Especially with a girl we just met. Like what the hell is actually wrong with you sometimes?” He seemed to try to keep being mad at him but couldn’t help to start smirking too.

A few moments passed as they exited the from the town’s attempt at a gaudy Main Street — a tourist trap without any tourists this time of year. Eliot leaned and smiled that warm smile at Naomi as Milton was distracted trying to merge onto the freeway.

“You know, I’m glad you took a chance with us. It’s cool to find another misfit, ya’know? And don’t worry about him, he’s all bark and no bite. You actually caught him on one of his good days.”

“What can I say? He’s the Brad Pitt to my Edward Norton.” Milton replied nonchalantly, clearly only pretending to not pay attention.

Cut back to the present. Have you ever noticed that Emergency Rooms have these large portraits of a blue, cloudy sky on their ceilings? It’s weird, they call it “sky-lighting” — but then it makes sense. The waiting times are awful, right? The cluttered populations of those rooms are a consequence of our glorious healthcare. Most of the time, the medical team triage correctly — bringing those about to die inside the quickest to take refuge, like the Innkeepers for everyone except Mary and Joseph.

“Patient’s name is Delilah Micah Rainwater. Presenting with arm lacerations and acute Acetaminophen toxicity.”

Then it makes sense. Those who aren’t so lucky, those that die in the ER — slouched over in their plastic chairs, bulbous heads hanging back motionless — that the last thing they see before they depart is those ceiling portraits. The blue sky above.

To be honest, although it seems like a nice gesture upon first glance, what exactly the significance of this? Do our spirits need to float upward? Does the pictured sky help avoid confusion?

That’s all she could afford to think about — the question circling the drain in her mind — it helped with the turbulence. So much turbulence. The kicking and screaming, the being held too tightly, the crying. Crying. Nobody likes crying, okay? It’s dumb. It’s exhausting. She doesn’t do it anymore and she wishes everyone else would get the memo.

Eden was crying as they brought her in, carrying her like she was their wife on Honeymoon, blood still dripping down her arms, vomit still dripping down her chin like a stubborn infant during feeding time. What a sight. Sure, the girl wasn’t at 100%, or even 10%, but that didn’t mean this would be at all easy.

Before, she softly begged Eden to just let things happen as they do. For anybody would have to admit the obvious, of how absurd it would be to save the gazelle from the lion.

The countless gazelles, thrashing about with their baby-pink stomach and ruby-red intestines spilling out onto the Savannah dirt before being eaten — nobody can stop that from happening. Happens all the time.

Let nature take it’s course, Eden. Please. This was all too much for her. Just a girl. She could handle the bombings at the Oka crisis that killed your parents, she could handle you moving to Shitwood, Alberta for a good-paying oil job, she could handle the often zero text messages and increasingly isolated lunch hours, she could handle her ribcage and collarbones and not eating, she could. But then, all at once, it’s so much. It’s just too much.

That’s why you should have just let nature take it’s course, Eden. Let her float up and away from all of this. You’re strong enough to keep going, it’s not that big of a deal, she’s just been another responsibility for you. You both knew that — she’s sorry.

But you should be proud of her, despite both the pills and wounds, they still needed to sedate her — just that much of a crazy bitch, right? Or maybe you should be ashamed, she wasn’t even able cut deep enough or take the right dosage. Couldn’t even do that right, right? You know, this self-pity doesn’t look

good on her, that was more Milton’s thing. Yeah, whatever.

The violence eventually dissipated, but Eden wasn’t even around when she finally woke back up — they couldn’t miss that much work. When she came to, her first lucid thought was worry — worry that she had missed Christmas. Can you believe that?

The nurse shook her head, she had only been out for two days, not two weeks. The girl looked outside, the gentle snow falling barely noticeable beside the ambiance of the children’s hospital. She was still only seventeen. She was caught off guard by the pain that accompanied moving, any sort of moving.

“It feels like I got hit by a truck, Jesus Christ.” Her first words after coming back to life.

“Honey, these men have a few questions about what happened.”

Despite the pain, her entire body recoiled, almost going into a fetal position as the two tall men stepped into the room, dressed in sturdy and black fascist uniforms with “CPS” on the side of both their shoulders. Reminiscent of people that were responsible for slaughtering numbers in her family.

When Naomi was able to speak again, she cussed under her jaded breath. No, she wasn’t going to be pressing charges. No, she wasn’t going to be answering any questions. Come back with a warrant, fuckers.

She found herself drifting back to sleep shortly after — probably for the better. Pitch black. Quiet. When she woke up again, all the colours were so vivid. Maybe she was just overreacting — yeah, she just needed a friend to talk to. But Jesus, who would that be at this point?

Everything was far quieter now, it must have been the middle of the night. Was there any medical staff, even? Naomi tried sitting up, collecting herself. Eden should have visited by now.

She began, “It would have been so much better if he killed me. — No, no I’m not, I’m serious. Listen, only in death is the woman the perfect victim. No pulse, no voice. She’s transformed into the perfect victim for our sympathy, right? No murky ambiguities or nuance that needs to be picked with a fine-toothed comb. No dumb fucking questions and skepticism and denial.” Running her hand through her long hair, black roots were showing, everything was thinning. Nobody ever talks about that kind of thing.

“A perfect narrative device instead of a breathing human being. I’m so sick of nobody just treating me like a person. Fucking nobody. Not even Eden.” Tears were running down her soft dark cheeks, wiping them away with her injured arms, an entire body shaking without realizing it.

She was fine, better than fine, in fact there wasn’t even any reason for her to stay in the hospital at this point. It’d be far easier to rest far at home, away from all these people that didn’t have a clue, where she knew her succulents were dying without her.

There were only a few worrying beeping noises from the machines surrounding her bed as she ripped out the wires attached to her body. Freedom. Feeling drunk as she stood up for the first time, looking around to find that there was still nobody coming to her room. She really just needed somebody to talk to right now, right?

The metal door she found in a tight stairwell was cold to the touch, and when opened, those shards of frost hit her face. She had lived in this province long enough to be used to that by now. Steeling her nerves as she stepped out, making footprints in the untouched snow as she made her way to the street. Two sets of footprints.

It didn’t take the girl long to make her walkabout towards downtown. Never actually having been to the city before, it still endured this eerily familiarity to her. A nostalgia. She thought back to Eden, reluctantly, one last time. She wondered if they should have just ran away and crossed the border to Cascadia. As though there could be the possibility of true freedom elsewhere — but that’s just another lie. You can’t run away from yourself, you can’t escape yourself, that always follows you.

Naomi laughed hard thinking about that, surprised by how it sounded coming out of her. She might have even snorted before pausing to catch her breath, looking at the display in front of her.

The lights on Stephen Avenue were — in spite of everything — the brightest thing. The puddles on the uneven concrete ground making distorted watercolours from the multi-coloured neon above, being mirrored in. The sun would be envious. Naomi’s colourless hospital gown fluttered in the winter wind like a Monroe dress. The strings in the back nearly coming undone.

She lifted her head slowly and looked up to the unapologetically blue sky above — it made sense.