Disclaimer: As far as I know, these characters belong to Terry Moore. They certainly don't belong to me, and I am not making any money off of them. This story is rated PG. Please contact me before posting this anywhere unless I have given you blanket approval previously, considering I just like to know where my stuff goes. :) Comments and criticism are welcome at silverag@hotmail.com , flames will be deleted on sight.

Summary: For those of you who don't know Strangers in Paradise, which I assume is many, Katchoo is the girl speaking in this fic, and the guy is named David. Katchoo is in love with a girl named Francine who keeps  falling in love with men that either treat her like shit or just are NOT right for her. David is in love with Katchoo. After Katchoo and Francine go seperate ways, Francine gets engaged to a guy. David and Katchoo are living  together in a house on the beach, and this is my take on that arrangement. Enjoy!

*Bodies*

Kaleko Kitty

I'm laying in bed thinking thoughts that shouldn't be mine. And he's laying beside me, and he turns and says "But you're always with me in my sleep."

"I don't know why," I tell him, because I don't. Because it's like being inside someone's head and turning the wheels there but you don't know how you are because you still don't get them. They still look at you with stranger's eyes and speak to you in a foreign language.

When he speaks about his dreams there's something in me that starts to bleed and I don't know what to say to him. So I just open my hands up and speak like I don't know who I am, like I've lost myself completely in this oblivion I've created.

But like Fiona says, it's calm under this blue oblivion.

So the color of the sky in my world is multi-colored because I'm so fickle, or because sometimes the drugs go to my head, which is what they're supposed to do. They say something's broken up there, one membrane is not talking to another, but that can't be right because I hear the talking, but maybe it's not the kind of talking that there's supposed to be.

And when he gets up and leaves me the bed is so much bigger than I remember. I still sleep but waking without him there stabs and I bleed all over again but this time from the outside, from my dry, cracking lips.

He says to me, "Why do you play these games with me?"

I don't know, 'I don't know' I tell him. But he doesn't know the pains he turns in me, this swelling, cancerous lump of emotions stirring in the center of me. Burning candles and taking baths won't fix it but a good, long cry does. They tell me breaking things is not the answer, they tell me crying doesn't fix things. I wish they understood, it does. It does.

All we have to do now
Is take these lies
And make them true somehow
All we have to see
Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me

George Michael sings our anthem on the tv, the moody blues and electric purples of the supermodels in the music video illuminating our room.

He says to me, "You don't think that's us, do you?"

And I say, "No, of course not." But when I cry, he knows I'm lying. He just says it doesn't show, and that is his lie.

We wash away our sorrows at breakfast, drowning the waffles in syrup and pretending it is us. It's so obvious where we both are, cornered into this lie we can't force the truth upon. Even if we could, where would we be? We're so afraid of either outcome we just stand still, not wanting to be alone but not wanting to be together.

It's like going through life and knowing what you want but knowing it doesn't exist. It's not that it's impossible to get it, it just doesn't exist, at all, anywhere, so you settle for the next best thing. But it makes you want for the thing you really want, that doesn't exist, that won't ever exist, because technology and science can't make it possible. Only the conditioning of a heart, far away and guarded from you, can change that.

So dinner starts with harsh words and never ends, harsh words from my mouth, 'cause he won't speak. He'll only glare, and sometimes coo, because he believes he can save me.

He thinks it's possible to reach into my chest and hold my beating heart in front of my eyes and read the inscriptions on it to me, to tell me how I really feel and that it's all just a cover.

"It's all just a cover," he says. "It's a blanket. A disguise, so they don't recognize you. You don't want them to see the tears in your eyes or the smile on your face, and you hide yourself from the ghost pains that still linger."

I say, "What are you, a poet now?"

He says, "Like you? Never."

And I would say thank you but I'm not a poet. I write what is in my heart and stab it into the pretty world of the narrow-minded sheltered girls that sit in a group giggling behind me in my sophomore year of high school. I am insane, crazed with anger, firing a gun into the hearts of every person that thought they knew me well. I am the last thing I want to be in this world, I am the proudest of what I have become.

In the end, I am the naked body next to David's, stirring in the darkness.

*end*