When Karin returned home early from a ballet class on a Friday afternoon, El was sitting in the bathroom, her head bent and her loose, short, black hair falling into her amber eyes, gaze turned downward. El held a gleaming steel razor against the skin of her left arm, pressed close enough so that the skin around it turned white. Under the razor, on both legs, and covering the inside part of her arms were a few hundred visible scars; most were old, white, and faded, but some were newer and pink. All were thin and longish and ran parallel to her knees or to her wrists. Karin dropped her bag and went in to her lover, an old, tired apprehension clouding her dark brown eyes.

"El--" she said catiously, her voice shaking.

El looked up slowly, biting her upper lip. "I'm sorry," she said, low and controlled. She held back further words, because a torrent of sobs lay raging behind them.

"Give that to me," said Karin, and she took the razor away. Her eyes shut briefly and she breathed hard, but her countenance remained composed. "Elissa, baby, it hurts me so much when you hurt yourself." She pulled El to her roughly. "Come on. Come out of here."

They went into the bedroom and sat on the bed. Karin nervously smoothed the blanket with the side of her hand, her unruly wheat-brown hair slipping out of the tight dancer's bun to frame her thin face, softening her shart features. El sat on the edge of the bed and yanked at a frayed string savagely.

"What's wrong?" Karin asked.

Without taking her attention away from the knotted string, El replied softly, harshly. "Clara called."

"Clara?" Karin hid alarm, pressing her thin lips together for a moment. "What did she want?"

"Toaster oven. It was hers-- that's no problem. It just kills me to even talk to her. ...She has every right to hate me. I could hear it in her voice, dripping saccharine-covered icicles. I'm scared. I don't want this to happen to us." She took a shuddering breath, as if to say more, but stopped and bit her lip again.

"Hon... it won't. Elissa, ragazza, you love me. I see in you how that love is mature. And I love you... only I hate to see you hurting."

"I'm trying to be happy. Every day it's this huge push. But it's so difficult. I.. I just can't live with myself."

Karin, worn out physically and emotionally, felt the stirrings of an unwelcome anger in her. As real as the melodrama always was, it was so tiring to deal with. She went into the kitchen and absently put water on to boil. There were leaving in an hour to go hear Melissa Ferrick sing at a club in the city. Karin would make El eat, whether she would or no, but neither of them would enjoy the meal. She slumped limply at the kitchen talbe, all the dancer's grace gone for the moment out of her deceptively frail-looking body.

They ate, washed dishes, and got dressed quietly. El insisted on driving, knuckles white on the wheel, and she growled about the lack of parking, but she smiled faintly when she did find a space. They walked hand-in-hand into the building.

Karin was carded at the door, as sometimes happened because of her lack of height and her youthful features. El, too tall and tough ever to be questioned, doubled over laughing. The two made an interesting pair, for Karin, though small and delicate-seeming, was by far the stronger of them, made into invisible steel from her years of ballet. She pushed the joke.

"Yah, little ballerina doll, gonna be an angel in the Nutcracker?" El appeared to forget her difficulties and called out amiably to friends as they went to sit down. Karin laughed giddily with relief, but a little, hurt part of her stored the incident away into a long memory of greviances.

They stayed like that, joking and boisterous, until the singer came into the room. Then El went quiet and the traces of laughter went from her face, but her skin exuded and ecstatic expectancy that was kept barely in check.

As the singer began to play, a release passed through El; she concentrated intently. Her world narrowed slowly. She grew unaware of the crowd as a whole, then her friends, then the seat and the walls and the floor; even the presence of the woman she loved most in the world drifted out of her consciousness. Her eyes focused sharply on the intensely emotional face of the woman singing. She heard every sound perfectly, stored every strum and every lilt of the beautifully harsh and clear voice away in her mind. The words did not seem to be processed, but to go right into the depths of the place in her mind from which her emotions originated. She had no idea of the passing of time; she didn't applaud. Once in a while, a phrase or two caught her consciousness and seemed to burn there with a profound, frightening relevance.

"Somebody stop me 'cause I can't get out/ I am trapped in my head/ And my body is gonna give out..." El remember briefly the day she'd come out to her mother. The shock had turned to revulsion and El had ended up with out a home, ended up that night running futilely along the beach, through the surf to nowhere. She had run on and on, unaware of the freezing water or the black loneliness of the night, refusing to think, but thinking and thinking. How could she have done this to her family; how could they have done this to her? She had run on until she'd collapsed in the sand, sobbing. Thought was a spiral that dug itself into the soft, helpless part of her brain, a cruel spiral ever digging father into self-loathing. It fed itself, and once they started on the wrong path, her thoughts didn't stop until something in her body gave way.

"I'm hurting myself to take/ ...the feelings' place." The impact of this statement hit El hard. That was why she cut herself. Her feelings built up and up until she lost control and couldn't function and the world because a wild crazy painful agonizing mass crowding tight around her too big and too large and too complicated and she could hold no thought in except the biting awful need to focus herself with pain with anything with blood with blood... Then she would cut; the world would shrink silently, immediately back into focus. When cutting she was calm, numb. When the feelings got too big, she hurt herself, replaced the emotions she couldn't control with a physical pain she could focus on, control.

"I don't forget anything,/ And it scares me half to death." The burning was intense now and on the inside of her eyelids El saw ex-lovers, ex-friends, ex-relatives, all crowding in noisily. They all, in her mental images, had the right number of freckles, the right thickness of eyebrows, the exact hue of eyelashes. Their expresses the last day before the "ex" had to be added to their title. Parting words, parting looks. The sound of their footsteps walking away. The ways, small or large, obvious or subtle, in which El had betrayed them, every last shred of broken hope. And fear; every memory of the past brought with it fear of the future, because every sweet memory ended somewhere in bitterness. Except with Karin. The thought of Karin was only bitter in projection, not reality.

She slowly became more aware, conscious of the words and the more random noise of the room. The performer was singing "When You Left".

"And I know that they say you should see yourself/ In your lover's eyes,/ But I can see my soul/ And it makes me want to die..." That did not need interpreting. That was so clear and so true and so piercing that she felt her eyes filling with tears. She got up blindly and stumbled quietly into the restroom. Out of the corners of her senses, she perceived Karin getting up to follow her.

El splashed cold water on her face in a panic, trying not to hyperventilate. She could see her own soul now, every outline of it, every motive behind every action, and she saw quite clearly that she was not much more than what tortured her. Take away her pain, her exquisite, poetic, unbearable pain, and what depth had she? She was only ordinary then, a little careless and a little lazy, but for the most part substanceless.

"El?" Karin said. Karin. Karin was there. What to say to Karin.

"Babe?" she asked again.

"Karin.. I..." El choked back the tears she could hardly ever let herself shed. "What she said. She could see her soul and it made her want to die? That's me. That's so. Do you see my soul? I don't think you have, yet. It's empty. It's nothing. It's my torturing myself about things." El's voice grew wistful and soft. "That's all I am. That's me... If I didn't do things to make myself hurt, make myself vulnerable to the pain of everything and let it resonate inside me, I'd have no depth. I'd be so shallow, two-dimensional. This hurt of mine, this endless sea of wrongness, it makes me deep. It gives me meaning. Meaning... I am meaningless... I..."

"El!" Karin, tired, leaned heavily against the door. "You... you don't know that. What is meaning. Who says happiness is shallow?"

Yours isn't. You are unselfish and your dancing is a passion. You love. I love you, Karin; I would die for you, I would kill for you. But I can't be happy for you. I can't abandon me. If I weren't agonized, I'd just be selfhish. I can be unselfish, but only if I'm allowed to let it hurt me. There's no happiness... Karin, I..."

"Babe," said Karin again. "Elissa," she whispered, "ragazza..." How could this be?, she wondered. When you fell in love with someone, weren't you allowed to assume that with enough compassion, you could make him or her happy? Wasn't that love? But if what El said was true... She pushed her feet heavily against the floor to keep from going down. There were both in complete, perfect understanding at that point, and it was horrible. They stared at one another, wide-eyed, breathing shallowly. Then the burden of knowledge that they shared shifted imperceptibly to Karin as let free the tears that lurked always in her chest. Unaware of herself, Karin smoothed away the tears, played out her role of comforter, and then led her lover back into the bar.

It seemed incredible that the world had continued through their scene, that people were drinking, laughing, listening. Melissa Ferrick was singing "Heredity". The two lingered hollowly, letting the words drift through them.

"I won't lay here and judge you,/ Cause everybody goes through their stuff/ But your stuff/ Is drowning us..." More talking, laughter, surface noise, another verse or two... then the crucial words: "There were tears of surrender/ and a stomach full of knots/ And she's thinking I should have said nothing,/ Cause I'm not ready to let this love go/ She thinks she spoke prematurely/ She thinks that I don't know/ That the liquid is killing her/ It's washing her away/ It's pulling her under..."

Neither of them spoke, but both knew separately that Karin was going to leave El, and that she had to do it quickly, before their lives grew more entangled. The two went back to the same bed for the last time.

Next morning, Karin had rehearsal. She got up early to pack an overnight bag, and before leaving, she spoke to El quietly.

"El, hon.. I'm going to rehearsal. After that I think I'll stop by Stephanie's house," she made her voice purposefully light, "spend some time there." She stayed still for a long time. "I... I can't stay if I can't make you happy, El. I just can't. There's no point in going into it. ... This has to be goodbye, because I'm not strong enough to put this off or pretend that it's not there. I'll call you about our stuff; we'll work something out." Karin resisted an impulse to touch El's pitifully expressionless face. "I'll never be able to tell you how sorry I am."

El lay wooden, for a span of perhaps two minutes. The croak that came from her throat might have been called speech. "Yeah, I know. Don't feel guilty for doing what you have to do, Karin."

To keep herself from crying, Karin literally ran out the door, stepping on her toes and leaning forward as thought she were in a ballet. El sat up in bed and with a slow look at the scars that covered her arms, she gently took from the nightstand a new, sharp, gleaming razor, and tore it firmly across her skin.

It was the only lover she would ever keep.