Instruments.

He would pace outside of her door for ages, experimenting with his words and coming so close to knocking.
He'd almost say something clever, then gulp down his words and button up his heart. He'd cross his legs and wait, knowing that by this point it wouldn't matter if he knocked, she would be gone.

She wanted him to know that she was gilded, and she'd lay on her bed and stare at the stationary blue and white of the sky on her ceiling and the floodlight in the middle that was the only sun she could stand. She'd ask him impulsively, "What if you weren't so rich and walked on dirt like the rest of us?" to mask up all of that resentment and effervescent love that she wanted to rip out and stamp into stringy webs so she could catch back her black widow wisdom. Tracing patterns on her arms, she'd walk from one corner and stay then the other corner and stay and then she'd breathe and stare into the blank television screen. She thought she was being so paranoid when she felt him outside of her door, so paranoid that she fondled the lithium in her dresser drawer and played with the idea of taking it today, just this once. But morphine numbs, and she traced another pattern and went numb and didn't worry about smiling. She knew that if he ever knocked she wouldn't hear him and wouldn't get up anyways, and then he would know that she tarnished.

He'd redraw her outline and put her down on paper, blueprint her figure and make her his own invention - but with chrome fingers and steam-powered lungs and lack of a heartbeat, he kept messing up on her face. It was then he would realize that he looked past her face, because she had half of it buried in her knees and her legs would show to her hips and hide the rest of her, but he wouldn't mind. He just wanted to pry her apart from herself so he could write her idea down and smell her perfume. The eyes were cold and beady and made of glass, but he could see that they were brown. He would saturate the air with a theatric sigh and mutter dementedly how he wanted them to be the color of champagne, pink champagne, because that's how they made him feel and that's how they probably looked anyway, if he could have seen past her knees and if she could graze him with dactyl bullets and pierce his eyes with her own sharp-edged glare. The one time she could say she looked at him and it would have mattered, he would assume that her eyes weren't there to begin with.

She decided that estrogen was her archenemy and she wanted to be nothing. She would rend her organs and rip out her maternity and sew it all back up with unemotional logic and sound judgement but mostly independence. She would build a clay bed with rust sheets and brass blankets, then paint the walls of Babylon on her ceiling and sleep, forgetting any of this had ever happened. If she would remove all of her parts, inside and out, she wouldn't feel anything. Seal it with morphine and lithium and steel wires, and weld her heart's chambers shut and coat it with chrome so she hummed like the engine of a father's brother's sportsmobile parked in a car lot in stormy Toledo. The fair folk would come in and chide her and tell her to stop crying, but she would sit and stare and count to one thousand and give herself black eyes rubbing the ink off of her cheekbones.
She wanted to be flawless skin, she wanted to be narrow bones.
Delicacy, delicacy, fraility, small of stature, lean of frame, tinier and tinier still.
Small enough that she could be carried away by the wind, and he would try and reach out for her before she blew away with the pigeon feathers above the buildings, but his arms would suddenly become too short and he would miss. He would miss and cry out for her, but the breeze will have swept her into the aether, where the pressure would be so low that she'd remain in a doldrum and that would be heaven, dissolving around her and disintegrating her body bit by nerveless bit.
She didn't like eating anymore, but she did like breaking priceless vases.

When and if he finally held her, he retraced textures on her arms and drew more patterns, leaving his fingerprints on her pores and illuminating the tissue until it bled by-products and you could touch her under the black light and she'd glow.
Mydriasis made her eyes that champagne color, and made him want to see how much of her he could get under the black light.
She just wanted to be in a box, the kind that collects dust in the corner of your attic and you could auction it off if your house were to be foreclosed. But she couldn't keep her mind off of his hands on her ankles and her calves and up to her hips, which he touched because he usually saw all of them.
She wanted to scream and cry and rip everything out, but her hands wouldn't listen and they left welts down his shoulder blades, defiantly scraping his muscle toward every instrument she owned, because she wanted to see what kind of symphony he could compose. Of course, she'd never know because she could hardly gasp; the pain didn't hurt but the thoughts did. More than the knife, the syringe, the throbbing and burning of her throat, the thoughts hurt so badly. She remembered thinking, 'some people just hate to be alive,'. But as she boiled down to her bones in the searing heat of her senses, she marvelled how horrible dying can be.
And she died all of the time, so she cherished being alive.
He thought he had killed her by the time he closed his book and readjusted her camisole straps off of her shoulders, like he remembered. She was red and gold and pink and warm brown, and temperate to the touch, but she had changed since the last time he had saw her, not noting the fact that this had always seemed to be the case; she came and ran and was as unpredictable as he was, but that's why he kept a space in his bed open every weekend.