Miss, Do I Know You?

01 - Monday, August 31

The universe seemed to have conspired against me as I found myself seated on the frigid porcelain tiles of the bathroom floor, stripped of my clothes, with a cigarette smoldering in one hand and paper towels in the other, wiping the blood and dirt away from my hands and face. It was like a scene of an absurd crime, like an abstract painting gone awry. Echoes of my laughter mixed with the buzz of the hand dryer overhead, whipping my hair around that was drenched like a forgotten garden left to wither in the rain.

Despite my attempts at trying to scrub away the filth, to drown out mistakes under the freezing water, I could still feel the grime that was ingrained in my skin. Even in self-awareness, the realization of being a disaster, there was nothing but laughter—little jagged spurts of abandoned joy that bubbled and spilled over as if they had been building up in some dark corner all these years, waiting for chaotic release. This was new. To laugh out of amusement, and not the hollow, acidic kind that had become familiar through the months.

Rewinding the reel of my life just a handful of days, I was snuggled comfortably in my room, half-drowned in the liminal fog that exists between consciousness and dreams following a long day of work. A trail of bottles, abandoned on the wooden floor after another argument, and the comfort of my guitar were the only witnesses to yet another weekend spent alternating between work and my four-walled world. It wasn't always my reality, that seclusion and apathy, but there was something cozy about the lonely solitude. Though the emptiness sometimes hurt a little too much.

It never really went away. The simple pleasure of slipping into sleep was getting harder to reach as each day ended, and my eyes were becoming more insomniac. But one deep breath of nicotine and a guitar strum later, the sudden beep of my phone shattered the fog, and the flashing name on the screen etched a smile onto my face. It was one that had been long missing since the summer months had rolled in and swept her away from my immediate world. And what I hungered for the most then was some comforting company to distract me from the monotony my life had been plagued with.

"Hey, I've got an idea," Olivia's voice exploded from the device, barely audible over the raucous laughter in the background. Another party, no doubt. She was a social moth, forever fluttering amidst people and noise. "It might be crazy."

An instinctive nervousness began to suffuse my gut, heart beating wild with nascent curiosity. There was always something about her that made me say yes even if it sounded like sheer idiocy—maybe it was that adventure, that uncertainty that I had, over time, learned to crave, mostly in her madcap ideas that trod a fine line between whimsically eccentric and absurdly outrageous.

Little did I know that this time, it would be both.

Back in that bathroom, the harsh lights threw the absurdity of my situation into sharp relief. I looked like a casualty of some disastrous misadventure, lifted from some slapstick comedy, disheveled and bleeding, my clothes torn in places, wiping away the evidence of my bizarre morning. And maybe that was what made everything humorous—that amidst such disaster, a strange charm shone through, a twisted humor of some kind, as if I had traded one form of chaos for another.

My cigarette was almost reaching its end when knocks came to the door. Startled out of my daze, I had half a mind to ignore it, but the voice of my best friend echoing through and calling my name was a welcome relief. I snuffed out the last ash, hurled what remained of it out the window, and drew her within.

"Finally," I groaned. "I've been standing here with my ass out for like half an hour already."

"I looked everywhere for... what the?" Olivia's wide eyes scanned my mangled figure from top to bottom, brows arched high on her forehead. "What happened?"

"Don't ask." I laughed it off. "Looks like you got my message."

"Took me a few reads to decipher it, but yeah. Here you go."