When it failed the second time, it numbed her. The words "I love you" and "I want to be with you" felt hollow, like pennies thrown into the bottom of a tin bucket, not a wishing well.
The letters seemed to bounce around her arms, her ears, her shoulders, and even her legs.
She could no longer feel it in her fingertips or her toes. They seemed to rest there a moment, pooling like raindrops, but then they beaded and slipped away.
And she hated herself because she couldn't believe them, couldn't use them to insure herself through another few months. She knew too well their haste, their aftertaste. She wanted to cry selfish tears, but the skin around her eyes had grown so thick; it no longer needed the moisture.
She wanted to turn over, to go back and make it all true again, but the thought of overexposure, of more cuts, and ultimately the devastating loss of more layers petrified her to numbness. And she sat staring out the window, eyes trained on the leaves falling into the darkness. The sun was dying and soon it would be too cold to feel this.
The phone felt like lead and it drooped lazily against her as her ears took in the sounds, the confessions, the darkest of what could be real about her, could be real about him.
And she hated herself for disbelieving, but was left no option.
She could no longer be fooled in this third skin.
God just once she wants to be fooled; she wants so badly not to see it coming again.
It was only after a few weeks that he took it all back; the phone died.
And she cried only once, wishing one time she could be wrong about all of it.
But in this quiet, knowing darkness, she knew not what lay upon her horizon...knew not that it would be what could thaw everything...
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