–

I stood, leaning over the rail that edged the roof of the old abandoned library, hardly noticing the fine view it’s superior height afforded me.
It also afforded me solitude, as access to the building and roof was locked, additional chains and padlocks added to the existing doors.
That’s where being able to pick locks came in handy.

‘Roof and Tunnel Hacking’ never really took off here, not like it had been at the British universities back a few decades, especially now with the introduction of electronic locks, security and cameras, it was barely worth the effort, if it was even possible most times.
But they hadn’t bothered with the old abandoned library, just locking it up, with vague notions of some future use, while moving the books to a new building, one that looked like a bad attempt at modernizing a template Bauhaus design.
So, standard lock, no cameras. Perfect for letting me in and keeping others out. Solitude.

With solitude, however, comes space for thought. Eventually my mind had chosen ‘bad relationships’ from the mental jukebox. There were plenty of those tracks in there, so the odds of one coming up sooner or later was almost guaranteed.

I was puzzling over certain friends and Ex’s who had given me the ‘Et tu, Brute’ treatment, each leaving me a fine set of knives ensconced in my back, and the lack of apparent reasoning behind this.

‘I could pay them a visit it you like, fuck them up a bit’.
I turned.
Darkling. I should have known.

Darkling, as I referred to the embodiment of the depression part of my bipolar cycle, sat on top of an old air intake box, gazing at me with her fathomless ink black eyes.

‘You can read my thoughts?’, I said, partly impressed, partly annoyed, and partly embarrassed, because, creepy black eyes aside, I had to admit, the girl had it going on, and I had often had stray inappropriate thoughts about her.

‘D’uh’, she said. ‘ And you’re not too bad yourself.’ She licked her lips lavicously, which was kind of gross.
‘Hey, don’t judge me honey’, she said, obviously still inside my head, ‘My appearance to each person is a always loosely based on their own selves, so it’s almost yourself that you were thinking of doing that thing your with your tongue to. The thing where you …’

‘OK!, I get it! I didn’t really need that information or image, thanks anyway.’
I looked at her more closely. I wish I looked like that, she was what I might look with some heavy and skilled editing in one of those smart phone beautifying apps.

“And no, thanks, there’s no need to ‘fuck’ anyone up. Whatever they did, they had reasons that they believe deserved that kind of behaviour. Who am I to judge?
I’m not into revenge. I’d rather condemn myself to eternity in hell than inflict that kind of thing on someone else.’

‘Oh I know you would hon’, she said, having changed her clothing to be disturbingly accurately alluringly suited for my personal tastes that I almost blushed, and was obviously enjoying tormenting me by sauntering around in front of me, posing here and there.

‘What do you mean?’, I asked, making mental fashion notes of her attire. Maybe I could get that figure if I was a trained gymnast. Realising I was practically admiring my own ass, I turned my attention to the conversation.

‘We know you’d go to hell rather than hurt someone else’, she smiled.

‘Why else did you think you’re here’?