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The street that she finds herself running toward, away from the stench of the rotting wing bone bloody clot cloth garbage bin alley of the hospital, has a cement path bordering meadow grass and tangling rows of unnatural hazy blurring glowing blue simulacrum flowers. The neon petals grow high and along the wall of the hospital and horizontally past the border of the structure built of concrete and ornamented with roughcast pebble and shards of timeless dark bottle glass and broken ancient cockle shell sandy coarseness. The glow of the flowers force the wall to seem like the innards of a big belly moon aperture glistening cavern and when she arrives at the abrupt end at the wall's corner, the main strip in front of the blue glowing building is revealed. On the right side of the path beyond the hospital are sallow grassy mounds in lines of four and six. She wonders who's bodies are buried in such lumps. Black and grey flowers bloom atop many of the tiny hills creating a black and white effect in the dim growing wine darkness. Some of the mounds have white and black on the same flower along with other mounds of yellows and reds and greens. The colours look artificial compared to the black and grey. Even the blue of the hospital seems synthetic in comparison.

Maybe city founders are buried here. Maybe not. Maybe no one.

A raven hops and stands upon a mound as if it recently ascended at the distant end of the perceived hospital cemetery. It stares at Jane and she feels herself inhale like black feathers are in her breath. She exhales and looks away.

Many voices enter her mind all at once and touch her recognition. She turns and notices that the vicinity is full of people. Many, many people. The street in front of her is as alive and as crowded as an almost abandoned city can be. The sights and smells touch her brain and are many and her senses are filled with so much swirling dark light and molecules and vibration. She inhales so many unrecognizable scents because her senses are heightened beyond herself. She can somehow imagine touching taste and hearing smell. She can't put an abstract name to the unknown material blinking and humming at her awareness. Maybe she can hear and smell the noumenal realm. Maybe her noumenal self can sense her reflection. It's a settling and an unsettling thought. Her mind spins back to the morgue and she deems what's more troubling is that she still can't see herself in reflections. So maybe she's the entity existing in the noumenal beyond sense. Maybe this un-reflection is all there is of her.

Jane stops running and walks and listens to the sound of her bare feet on pavement and other sounds witnesses her and she listens and looks upon where she's going. There truly are crowds of people before her. Her eyes aren't lying. The masses are there; the lonely remnants of generations coming to an end. They wander and laugh and eat and drink and above all, smile. It's happiness that she interprets from the individual mannerisms culminating in this leftover of order, this loving celebration that spills it's alcohol and tries to get laid and pukes behind trash cans. It's a sight beholden to wonder. This brings about a reminiscence that she can't remember, but feels like she's been here before as a participant in the grinning and laughing and stumbling and fucking. No one's killing anyone, everyone looks like they're having fun and it's happening without a care for what may come tomorrow. Jane falls in love with all of the beautiful chaos despite her bubbling anxiety. It's a street party full of survivors encompassing all ages and fashions and class. The young and the nostalgic. The cool kids.

She joins the withered throngs of the many different people dressed in the binary camouflage. Woman and men who have long since drawn those faces in the sand to inevitably wash away at the tide. Perhaps there is a transgender woman kissing a transgender man. This is life and love not caring anymore about preconceived norms and all of the bigotry that comes from the authority of homogeneity. The creative spirit is powerful when it needs to fight and powerful when it needs to love. Though everything is war, there are spoils. People should remember that everything changes and norms are only interpretations and when everything flips, last becomes first.

It's through this enormity of clothes that barely hang upon flesh that she notices a black hood skull mask standing upon a coal iron bench in a blue grassy spot under a red maple tree at the entrance to what was once the city's park. The white paint simulacra is witnessing her direction before a background of forbidding leafless elms and overgrown clumps of fescue underneath a burdened torch style street light that somehow seems antecedent to the city itself. Like it's a landmark to a portal through a wardrobe.

Jane raises her eyebrows and points to herself. The skull mask gives the thumbs up and motions for her to walk over. Jane moves through the midnight crowd, knocking into lovers, pushing past inebriated chucklefucks and Eric Draven painted factions of scarred and fattened adults trying to re-live the long dead youth of war and Neverland. Everything reeks of alcohol, herbs and crotches.

A giant young man wearing aviator sunglasses and black leather pants with a long sleeve red dress shirt decorated with black wallpaper style flowers bumps into the mire girl and crushes her foot with a giant boot. Jane winces. He turns to her and says, "Sorry there, shorty."

Jane makes a fist with her right hand and swings like an arrow shooting up and out from a crossbow toward his face. She connects straight with the man's nose and he drops to the ground on his ass. Blood gushes into his mouth and everyone around him howlingly laughs in hysterical giddiness.

The wounded giant says, "Jesus Christ kid...it was an accident..."

Jane shrugs and this brings even more howls and barks from the drunken crowd.

"My bad," she says while still wincing.

And she hears a guy holler, "Holy shit! That's fuckin bad ass!"

She has a large grin curling her face as she limps through the rest of the crowd and they part for her like a human wall version of the Red Sea, offering her booze and tokes, which she mostly declines. She does puff on a joint from a spiky hair girl for a moment. Then someone roughly grabs Jane's ass and the joint is quickly extinguished upon that particular persons face. Sizzling and screaming and pointing laughter ensue. Jane walks away from the crowd. She's pissed off but smiling with butterflies in her stomach and confidence in her step.

She makes her barefoot way to Rist, walking up a small grassy incline to the bench. Jane looks up at the tall drink and sits down on the lone pew, crossing her legs and folding her arms and never looking away from the woman who still stands upon the bench, peering down at her through the ragged eye holes of a mask.

Rist jumps down and rattles the loose bench when she drops her butt upon it. She pulls her hood back and removes her skeleton face, shaking her long, brown hair out. Their eyes meet.

Rist has a tan face with a short, smooth nose and deep dark haunting bright black eyes that seem to penetrate all the way through Jane, back into whoever she used to be. She's also older than Jane by around ten years. Older than the Rist in the picture. The picture that's now somewhere in the hospital.

"What would you like me to call you, since you can't hear your own name?"

Jane turns her head to look at the crowd in front of her. The crowd that doesn't give a shit who she was or is. The crowd that seems to think this skinny twerp is a bad ass and might be fun to party with.

In front of her on the steps leading to an apartment, a pale boy wearing black is deeply kissing the lips of an unexposed girl in a gray dress who slowly becomes thoroughly exposed. A feeling hits Jane, a memory of a feeling so beautiful that more butterflies flutter inside of her belly. A tingling caress runs its fingers up and down her spine, melting away the mental armour that she's been growing since waking up drowning. Warmth flows across her body and within her being. A vulnerability echoes within her from somewhere buried in the darkness of her memory. The darkness of an abyss that she leans calamitously toward, an abyss that's misplaced her and that she's lost herself to. Too dark to see anything down there but Jane thinks she might be brave enough to jump into the depths of herself, as if this is all it'll take to find herself, the act of a blind jump. And then the feeling is gone and so are the boy and the girl. She wipes the tear of a lost memory from her malachite malocchio eye and turns back to Rist.

"Call me Jane. The name was on my toe tag. I was just in the morgue. Apparently, I die at dawn and rise at dusk."

Rist shakes her head and smiles as if Jane is telling a joke punching sarcasm.

"You can laugh if you want, but this is my nightmare. My Hell. I woke up at the bottom of a mire. I have no memory of myself. I can't see my reflection in mirrors. I was shot by an old man in the dead part of the city. He recognized me. Apparently I'm responsible for the state of this city and the people in it. He called me a narcissist with a saviour delusion and said he knew my mother. Then he shot me down. I don't know how many bullets he blasted me with, but I didn't die. And then the bastard killed himself because he couldn't kill me, or so that's what it seems like. I wasn't wearing paint back in the train and I don't have contact lenses. If your friend had shot me, I would've killed all of you."

Rist isn't smiling anymore. She's leaning back into the bench and staring off into the crowd.

"So, this is who I am, Rist. Do I sound like your old friend?"

The only silence haunting the air tonight is an answer to Jane's question.

"You know, by the look on your face, somehow I doubt it. I'm the definition of a monster, Rist. Oh, and one more thing. I don't have complete control over my body. It won't let me know things and it also takes me over sometimes. I become a passenger in my own life when I'm murdered or hungry."

Rist still won't say anything. Jane lowers her head into her hands, thinking that she's too harsh and has revealed too much for Rist to comprehend all at once. Being honest is a mistake. She must seem absolutely crazy to Rist.

It's all so frustrating and frightening to be basically a ghost. What's left of her that's human? Maybe this; she just wants to be with the friends who knew her and can tell her about herself and maybe her mother. She can learn who her friends are again and maybe one day, be whole again.

The silence from Rist hurts. Jane gazes at her. Watches in anticipation. The skull mask lady stares beyond Jane into the distant dark trance of the outstretching dystopia.

The mire girl begins softly crying and says, "I need help. I don't wanna die everyday. I don't wanna be like this. I want to remember. Please, Rist...say something."

Her sobs multiply as the silence builds an invisible wall between them. Jane feels it like dirt being shovelled onto her soul. She places her face back into her hands and doesn't try to stop the tears from pooling around her face.

Then Jane feels a hand upon her back and looks up. The skull mask lady makes eye contact with her. There're tears glistening on Rist's face, visible in the light of the dull, dim sodium street lamps.

"I love you. I'll always love you no matter what. You're my friend and you're still that girl from ten years ago. Whatever name you know now is who I'll call you. You're Jane. Whatever you've done, whatever this life has done to you, I love you. I really just don't want to lose you again and I'd like the chance to get to know the "you" of this time. If things can't be the way they were, and trust me, the way they were was horrific, they'll be the way they are and I'll be by your side for however much of it you'd like me to be."

Her words shock Jane. She wasn't expecting crystal clear clarity and definite intention after divulging such a mess of words and unbelievable events. What was she expecting though? Maybe not unconditional love. Maybe not acceptance and inclusion. This's what she's getting from Rist. The love of a friend. Jane is relieved and feels like a heavy anxiety has been lifted from her soul.

Rist takes Jane's right hand and holds it in her's, still looking Jane in the emerald eyes. Sweaty palms grip the mire girl softly.

"Your hand is warm. Your cheeks are flushed. I can see them because I'm this close. You aren't a monster, Jane. You died. Whatever your body went through before you died, maybe it did something to you. Maybe it brought you back."

Jane places her left hand upon Rist's and softly squeezes.

"Rist? Maybe this is the world that I've been dropped into because the other world, the world back then, had to let me go."

Rist unfolds her hands from Jane's, pulls Jane's shoulders toward her and wraps her arms around her. She buries her face in Jane's neck. Rist begins sobbing. This time Jane hugs her back with no quarrel from her body. Maybe her body letting her have this moment with Rist means something.

She thinks that this woman, this apparition of her past, needs her. Just needs her to be. To exist. To be here in this moment and to not fade away into the ghastly shadows of this dystopia, because what else could it be for her?

Jane makes a promise to herself that no matter what, she will be here for the friend who's willing to accept her as she is. Tears continue to blur her vision. She closes her eyes and they roll down her cheeks.

"I love you too, Rist. I don't know you but I sure feel like I do."