Untitled
Title: Save Me
Word Count: 1077
The world tilts and spins around you, colors stretching and shuddering and common objects losing their shape, and you can't help but laugh at all the times you intentionally did this to yourself, all the times that you lit up or shot up or generally poisoned your body in that vaguely controlled manner. You think of the club with the skinny balcony in the heart of the city, where you became intimately familiar not just with the freckled bartender with the curls of fire-red hair, but with the cracked leather sofa in the corner of the lounge where you'd collapse with your nerve endings screaming and your brain shuddering like jelly inside your skull.
You thought then that it must have been like dying, that confused bliss and terrifying tranquility, and now you feel a measure of satisfaction in knowing that you were right. Except now there's a cold fear that presses against your heart and sends tremors into your bones, because that knowledge comes with the understanding that there'll be no cute redhead with a glass of ice water when you finally open your eyes, that you won't laugh with your buddies tomorrow when you wake up in your sweat-stained clothing on your drool-soaked pillow.
The rush of adrenaline takes you by surprise, that same electric terror that would snap you awake at night and leave you reeling while you tried to separate truth from fiction, dream from reality, all the while gripping your blankets with your heart racing like it would every time you heard your father's mud-caked steel toes clomping up the stairs to your bedroom.
Your eyes open - as much as they can, at least - and the pitted wood floor fills your vision like the vast landscape of a new world, scrapes and scars magnified with horrifying clarity, individual grains of sand and the occasional snagged wisp of unidentified fluff and pupal casings of long-dead insects. It's rough against your cheek, the floor not quite worn enough to be smooth and the mud too dry to be forgiving. Of course - and you laugh internally as the thought trails through your brain - it's not like you've done much to make yourself worthy of forgiveness lately anyway.
The rain is lashing against the windows again, the noise magnified into something distorted and cruel in the empty shell of the small cabin. You summon the strength and motor control to roll onto your side, swallowing back the bile that surges up your parched throat. Water, water, everywhere... you think, and there's that sick, giddy laughter in your head again. That infamous black humor is part of what got you here in the first place, your tendency to take nothing seriously, to welcome the back alley fist fights with the sort of self-righteous indignation that was as much your trademark as your crooked half-smile. How dare they, you would think as they threw you against walls, hurled you into dumpsters, pummeled their fists into your stomach. How dare they.
You would bemoan your ill luck in the arms of whatever girl welcomed you into her bed, let her kiss away your aches and pains while you left bruises of your fingerprints on the cusp of her hips and buried yourself in the perfect warmth of her body, but secretly you always knew that you enjoyed it. That it kept happening because of some twisted longing for self-destruction. The chance to maybe come back as something better.
And instead, here you are. A stomach full of poison, the world spinning away from you, and only the rain and the cold wooden floor for company.
Is this what your brother was thinking when he told you it was all going to come crashing down? That your mouth was going to get you in trouble, that your habits were going to get you attention from the wrong people? Is this what he meant when he told you he'd rather see you dead than have to drag you, half-conscious and barely breathing, from the darkness of another near-overdose?
All just attempts to ruin yourself.
All just confused screams for help.
What would he say now, if he were actually still alive to see you like this? Would he pity you? You hope - wish, really - that things will be different than you remember and that he'll come get you one last time, perhaps without that knowing look on his face. He'll take you back to your mother's house and you'll sit together on the creaking old swing on the front porch, drink the terrible local craft beer and talk about where you've gone wrong. He'll tell you that he cares and it won't be in that lecturing, angry tone, and you'll tell him that you appreciate it rather than slinging profanities at him in your typical addled rage, and for the first time in nearly a decade you'll feel like you have family.
You focus your eyes on the door and will it to open. You beg and pray and scream in your head for him to come to your rescue one last time and give you a chance to prove that you're not the waste of life your father was, that you're better than your mother's deathbed condemnations.
And the door opens and there he is, soaked to the skin and so very much alive even though you know - in some distant, logical part of your brain the drugs haven't quite shut down - that you stood in the parking lot and watched him being put in the ground. Obviously you were wrong, though, because his boots are thumping across the floor toward you with a sound not unlike your father's booze-fueled steps, and it confuses you, that mix of sound and memory, enough that you flinch away out of instinct when he crouches beside you, his face swimming in the drug-haze until he is unrecognizable.
"Still awake?" he asks, painfully incredulous. You try to answer him but your tongue is swollen and caked to the roof of your mouth. He senses your distress and reaches down to press his gloved hand over your mouth, and you can smell the rich leather, supple tones so fragrant they make your throat clench. "It's okay, man, it's okay," he tells you, and you feel cold metal against your temple, an ominous weight on your skull. "Here, let me put you to sleep."
Word Count: 1077
The world tilts and spins around you, colors stretching and shuddering and common objects losing their shape, and you can't help but laugh at all the times you intentionally did this to yourself, all the times that you lit up or shot up or generally poisoned your body in that vaguely controlled manner. You think of the club with the skinny balcony in the heart of the city, where you became intimately familiar not just with the freckled bartender with the curls of fire-red hair, but with the cracked leather sofa in the corner of the lounge where you'd collapse with your nerve endings screaming and your brain shuddering like jelly inside your skull.
You thought then that it must have been like dying, that confused bliss and terrifying tranquility, and now you feel a measure of satisfaction in knowing that you were right. Except now there's a cold fear that presses against your heart and sends tremors into your bones, because that knowledge comes with the understanding that there'll be no cute redhead with a glass of ice water when you finally open your eyes, that you won't laugh with your buddies tomorrow when you wake up in your sweat-stained clothing on your drool-soaked pillow.
The rush of adrenaline takes you by surprise, that same electric terror that would snap you awake at night and leave you reeling while you tried to separate truth from fiction, dream from reality, all the while gripping your blankets with your heart racing like it would every time you heard your father's mud-caked steel toes clomping up the stairs to your bedroom.
Your eyes open - as much as they can, at least - and the pitted wood floor fills your vision like the vast landscape of a new world, scrapes and scars magnified with horrifying clarity, individual grains of sand and the occasional snagged wisp of unidentified fluff and pupal casings of long-dead insects. It's rough against your cheek, the floor not quite worn enough to be smooth and the mud too dry to be forgiving. Of course - and you laugh internally as the thought trails through your brain - it's not like you've done much to make yourself worthy of forgiveness lately anyway.
The rain is lashing against the windows again, the noise magnified into something distorted and cruel in the empty shell of the small cabin. You summon the strength and motor control to roll onto your side, swallowing back the bile that surges up your parched throat. Water, water, everywhere... you think, and there's that sick, giddy laughter in your head again. That infamous black humor is part of what got you here in the first place, your tendency to take nothing seriously, to welcome the back alley fist fights with the sort of self-righteous indignation that was as much your trademark as your crooked half-smile. How dare they, you would think as they threw you against walls, hurled you into dumpsters, pummeled their fists into your stomach. How dare they.
You would bemoan your ill luck in the arms of whatever girl welcomed you into her bed, let her kiss away your aches and pains while you left bruises of your fingerprints on the cusp of her hips and buried yourself in the perfect warmth of her body, but secretly you always knew that you enjoyed it. That it kept happening because of some twisted longing for self-destruction. The chance to maybe come back as something better.
And instead, here you are. A stomach full of poison, the world spinning away from you, and only the rain and the cold wooden floor for company.
Is this what your brother was thinking when he told you it was all going to come crashing down? That your mouth was going to get you in trouble, that your habits were going to get you attention from the wrong people? Is this what he meant when he told you he'd rather see you dead than have to drag you, half-conscious and barely breathing, from the darkness of another near-overdose?
All just attempts to ruin yourself.
All just confused screams for help.
What would he say now, if he were actually still alive to see you like this? Would he pity you? You hope - wish, really - that things will be different than you remember and that he'll come get you one last time, perhaps without that knowing look on his face. He'll take you back to your mother's house and you'll sit together on the creaking old swing on the front porch, drink the terrible local craft beer and talk about where you've gone wrong. He'll tell you that he cares and it won't be in that lecturing, angry tone, and you'll tell him that you appreciate it rather than slinging profanities at him in your typical addled rage, and for the first time in nearly a decade you'll feel like you have family.
You focus your eyes on the door and will it to open. You beg and pray and scream in your head for him to come to your rescue one last time and give you a chance to prove that you're not the waste of life your father was, that you're better than your mother's deathbed condemnations.
And the door opens and there he is, soaked to the skin and so very much alive even though you know - in some distant, logical part of your brain the drugs haven't quite shut down - that you stood in the parking lot and watched him being put in the ground. Obviously you were wrong, though, because his boots are thumping across the floor toward you with a sound not unlike your father's booze-fueled steps, and it confuses you, that mix of sound and memory, enough that you flinch away out of instinct when he crouches beside you, his face swimming in the drug-haze until he is unrecognizable.
"Still awake?" he asks, painfully incredulous. You try to answer him but your tongue is swollen and caked to the roof of your mouth. He senses your distress and reaches down to press his gloved hand over your mouth, and you can smell the rich leather, supple tones so fragrant they make your throat clench. "It's okay, man, it's okay," he tells you, and you feel cold metal against your temple, an ominous weight on your skull. "Here, let me put you to sleep."