The Conservatory

I find peace among the plants, the humid air sticky against my skin. Brightly colored birds flit through the giant palms, their wings making fleeting shadow patterns against the sunlit glass ceiling. I am cocooned, surrounded by orchids and hyacinths, mind quieted by pills.

I spend so much time on my knees that they are always rubbed raw, sex is my only salvation, there is no God that I believe in. I keep my fangs sharp but practice smiling. 

We drive with the windows down, his hand slipped between my legs. The days get warmer and longer. Sometimes it hits me: I don't want this. But. I keep driving. There is always somewhere else to go. More drugs to take. It's been a month today since I lost the only thing I cared about. Looking back, I don't think I ever had her to begin with. A trick. A trap. But I pulled myself out, bloody and alive. A lesson learned. Trust no one, love nothing. I was a deer, first hunted by men and then finished off in the forest by predators when I was weak and wounded. 

But as I felt every last bit of my soul ripped from me in the last light of a cold dawn, I thought to myself, how do you survive in a den of wolves? 

And then I realized. You also become a wolf.