a cactus and a lily find a common pot to grow - trixya

Chapter 6: Part 2 - I'll leave the light on for a while

The one thing that Katya enjoys the most about being a "real adult" and having a "real adult life" is that she has a routine: she knows where she's going to be every day from Monday to Monday, at all hours and she knows exactly what she's going to be late for. If you asked a younger, twenty-something-year-old Katya, what she thinks about the routine of thirty-five-year-old Katya, she would have made a barfing sound and continue smoking her cigarette, laughing at the thought of a routine, but what she doesn't know is that in a very short amount of time, she's going to love the idea of knowing where she's going to end up sleeping, if she ends up sleeping.

And Katya's routine may sound boring to some, but it may also sound like an unachievable dream to others. She starts every day by waking up at five thirty in the morning and having her smoke, weekends included. From Monday to Friday, she has to spend the whole day at school, but she likes it there so it's alright. Considering that she doesn't have that many groups to teach anymore, she has a lot of free time to do her grading and class planning, so once she gets home she has all the time in the world to do whatever she wants: going grocery shopping, trying out a new recipe from random cookbooks she buys off the internet, cleaning the house, doing yoga and painting. The thought of having free time would make some people tear up.

Saturdays are not that different. She still wakes up at five thirty, she still has her smoke on the balcony but she doesn't rush. She always makes a big ol' American breakfast with eggs, bacon, and pancakes, eats them and by the time Adore wakes up the house is tidy and neat for them to mess it up again. She sits down and reads, usually, for most of the day, or makes a random Pinterest board that she's probably never gonna go back to. Sometimes, the girls from the club, and even Bianca, come over for a chat and some iced tea with vodka in it, since they have unlearned how to drink anything that isn't alcoholic. At night, she puts on her makeup, her best outfit, her dancing shoes and goes down to the Dame, just to kill time, talk to the girls and flirt with strangers while sipping on some virgin Sex On The Beach.

She loves her life and her calm routine that allows her to binge watch any reality TV show she wants at any time, but sometimes it can get... Tiring. It's tiring not having something to look forward to, it's tiring not having someone to come home to and fuck until you can't breathe, it's tiring to be thirty-five living with a twenty-seven-year-old junkie who still thinks they're eighteen and, most of all, it's tiring to feel like you're stuck in a world you in which don't belong in anymore.

Katya's suffered from an illness called addiction. For many years of her life, she consumed more cocaine and alcohol than actual food and, when you blend that in with her already existing anxiety, it isn't pretty. She's done things she doesn't even know the name of and many times exchanged her body for it, which is not, to be fair, an ideal life, but hey, you work with what you get.

After Ginger died, it got worse. More drugs, more strange beds, more greasy men and less Katya. Moving to Alverton literally saved her life. She didn't have to hook around anymore, she just stripped, and she made some good coin from it. Her life started changing for the better: she met Sharon, she started taking her online classes and suddenly she didn't have to be using any strong substances anymore, but of course, when you're an addict, that's not how your brain works. She still snorted an occasional line, smoked her everyday weed and drank her every night vodka, and she kept it going, but then one day, line after line after line, a little bit of this with a little bit of that and a whole lot of those resulted in her lying unconscious on a hospital bed, drooling and shitting herself while Bianca, Sharon and Adore watched.

The next day, when she woke up, Bianca was the only one standing there, still wearing the same and smelling the same from last night. "You're going to rehab," she said. Katya was still too out of it to answer properly, so she replied something in Russian because she didn't remember she had to speak English. But, in the end, she did go to rehab the very same day. And she stayed there for six months until she came back and finished her studies and in less than a year he was employed at Alverton High as an art teacher.