She had always thought the salvation she sought would be found in the grave, deep under the atrocities of man and all that the world was not. She flirted with death until the day he brushed against her lips with his putrid rotten own; Death was not beautiful. Living in a single hallway, stained with the tears of all it's inhabitants before her and those who roamed amongst her, wondering whom Death would claim first, was not beautiful either. The world was ugly, it turned the purest of eyes murky and unforgiving. Everyone sought some sort of beauty in different ways.
   A large population sought beauty in the Church, no matter how corrupt and disgusting the Clergymen often were, God gave them something tangible to believe in.  A select portion of the population used different drugs to make life a living beauty for a small period of time: marijuana, LSD, cocaine, MDMA, and heroin were often brought through her town in tsunami waves. Many of the users combined drugs with art and music to enhance the experience, others overdosed in gas station bathrooms. She didn't fit neatly into any category, nor did the women she lived with.
    They all had ended up here in the desperate endeavor to fill an emptiness that ached within them. They all had craved something more, tasted it on the tips of their tongues, drove themselves to the ends of their wits, to find something more. There was nothing more. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. They had all given everything to find nothing but death staring at them and a single towel-like blanket on a rubber mattress. They were all unfortunate combinations, clinging to life, told apart by plastic identification bracelets. They were not beautiful.