with or without you

See the stone set in your eyes.

The tombstone had been withered and bitter and probably really tasted like blood, but Grisom did not lean forward to lick from it the salvage relation to week-old supper. It was not raining, but it certainly did seem like the most perfect day for the heaven's to cry, helplessly sob until the entire sad world drowns in its sorrowful pity. But she did not want pity. Grisom just wanted for the woman of her crude life to come back to her, take back the rope and tie a knot around something else besides her should-be-bitten neck. Her eyes were watering, but she dare not tell herself that she was crying. No, that would mean that Grisom had broke the promise--the promise to always stay happy, never hurting, never regretting.
Even though her knees were growing weak, Grisom was not going to stop kneeling before the tattered grave. If she were to stand above the dead body, it would be the most disrespect she could ever deliver. Her cheeks swelled in a rosy texture, over-controlling the freckles that were put there by the sun's very own hands. She hated the sun. She also hated the imagination she had. Already, Grisom was picturing the woman below her to have eyes of cold stone. No longer would the burried young girl beam brightly, in an obvious flaunt of glory, with her greenish-hazel eyes. That literally drilled a hole through Grisom's heart, the blood that dripped beautifully glazing the grave of what she previously assumed was bitter. With high remorse, Grisom sighed by stroking her finger over the etched letters. She was blind, illiterate because she did not understand the languge. Then slowly, her finger drove into the loose soil she sat upon as she drew a heart--a checkered heart, and with an impish grin lightly sprinkled with her tears, she whispered, "I hate seeing you like this."
She was even shocked to not hear a reply. How very sad Grisom was.

See the thorn twist in your side.

Grisom brushed back a piece of gorgeously red, salty hair to twirl it into a knot. She now hated knots so badly, she refused to tie her Converse shoes like that anymore. Instantly, she tugged and strongly yanked at the strand until it literally was pulled from her head. Screaming, the dangling pieces eventually slid from the scalp and drifted to float and land in a pretty design around her artsy heart. Grisom glanced down, pretending that she was not still sitting above her love's grave. This was the last place that she was to rest--how painfully cruel that the reality check just then hit her.
Her finger danced in the ground, twirling effortlessly with the outrageously red-colored fragments of hair. She could not help but to smile, pretending that her index finger was her and the bundle of hair was who she dare not tell. But then she pulled away and rolled her dry palms and fingers together until the hair fell loosely from her grasp. Grisom bit down on her bottom, trembling lip, "I'm sorry, but I can't dance with you." The reason why, she was afraid to say it, but it truly did look like her finger over-powered the dancing partner, controlling her and moving her in moves that the unnamed girl most despised. Not only that, but Grisom narrowed her eyes and looked completely through the soil and the coffin and the worms and the roots.
She could clearly see her love laying, eyes forever closed and hands resting nicely on her abdomen. Her thin fingers were intertwined. No longer was the dead woman's hair warmly colored with brown tints and dirty blonde higlights, but the dirt secluded the flashy streaks and made the wavy, tomboyish style greasy and worn. Grisom so desired to run her small hand through her love's hair once again.
Mother-nature broke the coffin.
The nasty, cruel roots below where poking at the young woman's tan skin, eventually twisting into her torso. Grisom clenched her hands in the soil, "But I was supposed to have the last dance, dear."

I wait for you.

And then she said it. Four simple words.
Grisom collapsed on the ground, her cute nose practically touching the slate of the young girl's name, her hands at her side, her long legs bent, "I wait for you."

Sleight of hand and twist of fate.

She turned over, the dark sky coloring her body a few shades stronger, and wriggled until her figure lay perfeclty fit in the dead ground. Grisom closed her crying eyes in order to distort of the vision that nature would eat alive her love's beautiful corpse--eat from it her suicidal actions and throw it back up in her face. The world broke a record itself--to change a young girl's life so quickly that it put her in a permanent dementia. Little did Grisom know that she was constantly tapping her hands together, then following that weird action to slap herself in the forehead, casually saying, "You'll always be here. In here."
Her forehead started to bruise, like the poisonous apple she fed to her girlfriend that made her toxic and do what she did. The rope was lathered in juice. Grisom's body was too weak to fight against the shock treatment, so the bruise just kept growing in size, swelling massively. She was reaching the deadly dementia point of her romantic tragedy. Only something so crazily abrupt and ungodly could bring Grisom from the twisted accident of her unnamed love's rip from the stupid life she lived.
And then it was dark.
Grisom blinked, and also angrily bit, back tears from tumbling down her cheeks and softening the loose soil beneath her. She moaned in a scary hymn, "Fate has shifted."

On a bed of nails, she makes me wait.

The fact of the matter was: Grisom had been lying in that same exact position since the funeral ended. Even the flowers were sadly drooping over, the millions of flowers surrounding the young girl's grave. She reached into the ground, digging from it a reason to plummet beneath the soil and steal that dead body from the underworld of flames and ugly people. Then she shrieked wildly, retreating and sucking at her fingers. There was blood slowly surfacing from the little wounds on the tips of her fingers. Grisom sighed, "There was no reason to bite at me."
She was in denial. Of everything.
But as she continued to keep her restful position and laid there with her legs pointed straight, arms crossed at her chest to hide the most checkered and most shattered and most empty piece of her soul, Grisom could feel an intense pressure prick at her skin. She could actually experience thousands of sharp points stabbing at her back. Her frown straightened out to a puzzled grin--she did know whether to be impressed at this or to be furiously disturbed. Her brilliantly white teeth were grinding from the pain.
Grisom whispered, "Love, just because I wish to stay here with you as long as I can," she paused, hissing in twinge, and felt tears rip from her eyes unwillingly, "does not mean you have full permission to strap me down on this bed of nails. And force me," the ground below her quivered in fear, "to wait helplessly."
The nails did not go away. Blood was probably dying the back of her precious clothing a deep crimson, so saturated that the excess drops fell into the filthy dirt and slid through the air passages until it reached the door of the young girl's new, and permanent, home. Grisom terribly sighed, realizing that in order for her to lay there as long as she wanted, she would have to feel the pain of her one true love in order to comprehend what she obsessed most. Her heart was now the new Titanic, sailing away, knowing that it would never make it to shore. It would just descend in the coldness of the most icy core of the planet and be held in the arms of Death.

And I wait without you.

Grisom leaned up, holding herself as tight as she could, scared. She was scared, frightened more than she could ever imagine.
It hit her. Just then. Of what she could never mess with. When she glanced over to her clean side, it actually surprised her when she no longer seen that beautiful tomboy sitting beside of her. She would always look gorgeous, with her bronze skin and accessorized hair. Grisom adored her smile, her ambition to always bring out the best of people. Now she could only see a decayed corpse, eyes of rock, body's purple veins of green vines, and heart forever broken.
Her voice softly consoled that bitter fact with, "And I wait without you."

Through the storm, we reach the shore.

It started to rain.
The ballad of fallen angels, she thought of, when she regained her standing position and literally leaped so that her feet would not step all over the woman beneath her. Grisom's red hair was now a dark shade of maroon from the drenching tears from above. She pushed her face up, directly in line with the rain's plummeting highway. Resisting to taste the salty percipitation, she keenly eyed the eye of that storm. To say that it was colored a greenish-blue would in fact make Grisom feel intoxicated. So she opened her mouth and drank the elixir given the hands of God.
Grisom felt drunk from the shock. Her fingers twitched violently. The black and white striped scarf dangling from her neck began to sink in increasing weight, for the rain was making residence in the one place the troubled girl dared not lease. She tugged at it, feeling the constriction around her neck. The fangs of truth bit at her so hard. Belting as loud as she could, she screamed passionately in the most horrid sound, "Drown my crew! Bring down my sail! Goddamnit, please, just stop killing the captain!"
The rain answered.
It started to rain even more heavily than before.
She was shivering at this point for two reasons. One: she was cold. And two: she felt so disgusted and guilty that her love would have to drown in this terrible weather. Grisom took a step away from that chilling grave. The letters seemed eligible now, but she definitely refused to read the name of the one person she wished to never remember as long as she lived. Even if that be just a few more days longer. As she took her second step, Grisom could feel a sense of accomplishment flow through her trembling veins. What was happening to her? She felt safe. She was no longer scared. And smiling, she spoke down into the ground, "This ship of Titanic is no longer weighted by your false threat. It has reached the shore, without you."

You give it all, but I want more.

Grisom's lips were curving into a massive frown as she stood there, utterly broken, and untouched even though rain had been sliding down her bold figure for quite some time. She could see everything--the young girl's body dangling from the mighty, rough rope, her hair in so many countless knots, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, the shadow underneath her propelling body swaying back and forth. It was a beautiful tragedy, yes, but Grisom closed her eyes to shield her sanity from the incredible experience. Even so, she began to softly hear a creeking noise, a sharp shrill that tapped at the back of her mind.
She reached ahead, "Stop swaying. You can do this."
But the body just hung there limp. Grisom's young love had already suffered enough at this point--she did not deserve this. Not at all. After the old chair had already been kicked out from underneath her body, the girl instantenously changed her mind. Her heart took a left turn instead of a right. The rope only convoluted tighther at her thin neck, the bristles digging into her flesh and puncturing her every single breath. She shrieked numerously, and her gags were resentful and regretful and fantastically raw. Grisom shuddered, for the memory would not stop eating her alive.
Then it was all over. The girl could not survive the shallow plunge into Death's arms, so she is lost in the unknown void of a fine purgatory.
Grisom bit hard down onto her bottom lip, as she always did before, and chewed on the excess thin layer of skin until it rolled around on her dry tongue. Her heart was still racing, just at the thought of finding her love in that condition would rip from her the very life she lived and toss it away without a care. Carelessly, yes, and so candidly hardcore. The rain lathered her body in a neat coat and pitter-pattered on the grass. The grave swallowed up that downpour and choked; Grisom heard it. When she turned around, softly, her green eyes narrowed and she screamed in a light mixture of rasp and cool, "I know for a damn fact that you could have survived just a few more seconds longer while you hung there like a ragdoll." Relieving a cold breath, she stuttered in both air and words, "But you wanted to go. And I could not stop you."

And I'm waiting for you.

The rain stopped.
And she crossed her thin arms against her firm breasts and bellowed, "I'm waiting for you." It was spoken so smoothly that Grisom actually had to reconsider the fact whether she was upset about this woman's death or whether she was happy to be free from the binding spell of love. But that's all that she really wanted--love. Now that it was gone, she calculated how long it would take her to recover from this sudden, horrible crash into the stonewall of Jackson's fame.
It would take forever.

And you give yourself away.
And you give yourself away.
And you give--and you give--and you give yourself away.

For once in Grisom's life, as again stated previously in a brilliant ballad, the clouds parted from their attached limbs and allowed the scolding sun to scorch down onto the world and dry away all of those unnecessary tears from the heaven's. A victim of drowning was surely saved that day, but it was not Grisom's day. She liked that fall of rain. It made her feel cold, and that's what she did best. Though, nothing was working out the way she wanted. She was just a girl who wanted to find a home in someone else's arms, not have to buy it and only use it temporarily. And after it was all gone--all of the happiness sucked away and put in a box--she had to scarf up all of her tears to sell for just one second of devine attention.
"What has happened to us, dear?" She asked as she turned back to that grave and took steps closer to it.
What could she possibly think to gain from constantly going back?--Nothing!
The sun burned at her freckled cheeks. Grisom was getting annoyed. How could it be so instantly sunny just when the climax of her sadness burst into place? She grinded her teeth, her fists clenching so tightly and wildly that she literally felt the fury in her veins overflow and ripple into madness. She yelled at the shiny slate before her, the name interrupting her reflection again, "You gave up too easily. You allowed yourself to be given, and once happened, you did not even ask for anything in return." Grisom smiled as her eyes hid angrily under her drenched, knotty hair, "You never wanted anything in return. Too kind."

My hands are tied. My body bruised.

The ruthlessness finally boiled over in Grisom. Without any control over the nerves in her body, like she was numb but her mind still sent out those little inhibitions, her fists buckled and literally punched at that stone. The world was all over, to her. She punched and slapped and socked that sleight as long as she could take it. Screaming, Grisom could feel her knuckles breaking underneath the skin. The bones shattered into pieces and poked through her skin like little crumbs from the sweetest cookie. This cookie was bitter.
"Let me go!"
Grisom cried so terribly, wounds forming on her hand and bleeding massively. The blood spilled over her nails and trickled down to splatter against the indentity of the dead girl beneath her. Screaming and belting at the top of her lungs, the only words that would leave her solid lips were those three pieces to the scary puzzle.
Then she collapsed over and held her bloody, fractured, disturbed hands with a refrain fit for a descending princess. Grisom lay there in the watery bath and closed her eyes, shoulder blades searching through the soil. The coffin was pretty. But the girl inside it no longer was. She was withered, growing old far too soon, and bleeding dry blood. The sky glitched and the checkered heart finally committed mate. Grisom was so beaten, practically plummetting into a pile of crismon betrayal and finding bruises on her body that she never knew existed. It was brutal honesty--how she would not be able to heal.

She's got me with, nothing to win. And nothing left to lose.

"I'm going to have to leave you alone now," Grisom flatly said as she rose from her hole and stood, brushing off the muddy soil and layers upon layers of previously-mowed grass. Her fingers were still red, but fading to a fine pink shade after the water and air-dry contributed to the lift. When she reached down to pick from her pants pocket, she smirked cruelly and said to herself, "She never really did enjoy my company anyways." Since then did the third person-person semi-POV jump into her voice? It did not matter now, for she had reached the climax of everything--the burst of her terrible misery, her checkered heart slowly falling to the ground square by every black and white square, the over-flowing drops of salty tears spilling over her lids and staining her dirty cheeks with trails.
Grisom looked at that bloody grave and could still hear that lovely girl's voice, a voice so fanstastically ringing that she could sing any song that she wanted. That's why the entire world loved her--she was popular--but they did not see the young girl as Grisom did. She seen the young woman as a wondrous, confused female mixed up in the blasphemy of popularity and fame. As the tears continued to suck Grisom dry, her breath racing and heart beating rapidly without any control whatsoever, she took a single finger and pointed to that tombstone--the wind caught up, catching her now-dry scarf and forcing it to glide and dance and bounce on the breeze's wide arms. Glaring, Grisom opened her mouth to yell cruelly at the woman who had absolutely no power to defend herself, "--!"
But she was speechless.
She had nothing more to say than that cliché fact of wanting her back. Grisom then lowered her shoulders and softly let out a quick breath, one full of relief. And happiness. All that occurred during the lovely girl's death--cancelled each other out: it was like nothing ever happened, besides an extra grave magically appearing in the Ravenwood Cemetery, the one belonging to a recently deceased girl. Who committed raw suicide by wrapping herself up like a gift.
Grisom placed her hands into her dampened pockets, rocked onto a single hip, and questioned, "Why did you not leave a mess behind for me to clean up? That's not like you. I wouldn't have minded."
She could feel an increasing beat of rhythm inside of her.

I can't live. With or Without You.

Smiling, the red-haired beauty pricked the snappy frame of her cap from her pants and placed the black hat onto her head, the faded bill cleanly hiding her pair of fiery green eyes. Grisom knelt down quickly to tie her Converse tennis shoes--even at a funeral, she still managed to be herself. That's all she ever wanted, to be honest. But only one person knew that. Gently, raising back onto her legs and tucking the second dangling part of her striped scarf behind her, Grisom pulled her muddy hands from her pockets and flared her pale fingers.
She exclaimed vividly, "I don't have anything. Don't be sad."
But when she turned her back to that resting, crummy grave, a square-like item fell from her body. It toppled and rolled onto the dirty until it lay kindly at the edge of the grave's frame. Grisom could not stop smiling, even if the tears tasted awfully nasty when the corners of her lips separated. She took both of her arms, forearms pointing straight up into the sky with fists, and waved them back and forth is an odd rhythmic manner. Grisom swayed her body, simultaenously walking from that tombstone in the most frightening escape.
Grisom was singing.
The jewel CD case, the one containing a single CD with only one track, began to fill up with muddy water. It was going to drown. But so wasn't she. The dirt was so hungry for something besides flesh that it literally plummeted into the shiny object to permanently damage the contents. It had given up too easily. But so didn't she. It was screaming loudly, wildly, out of control that it could pierce glass to shatter it into thousands of tiny pieces. But so wasn't she. Grisom twirled in the humid after-rain, the song belting from her lips and dancing heavenly about on the pine trees and the rest of the mournful graves. Grisom cried so much--couldn't stop it even with all of the energy flowing through her body. But so didn't she.
She could not stop singing.
Finally, the hymn and tune of the crew entered into Grisom's body. Softly, she tilted her head to the side and commented, "With or without you." Pausing, Grisom stared up into the gray sky--she loathed gray so much. The last bit of that tasteful, classic song left her lips. The chorus was complete, the bridge was finished, and now it was for the closing. Grisom closed her eyes to feel the solid heaven beams scorching down onto her pale skin. It was steaming hot, but she did not care. She was not scared to burn up in the arms of her angel. "I can't live," Grisom sadly whispered, "with or without you."
And under that cap, she was still smiling.