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 grime under the freezing water, it remained on me, somewhere under the surface, no matter how many circles I rubbed over my hands and how red I turned my pale skin. But even in self-awareness and the realization of being a disaster, I felt a warm, fuzzy pride. This kind of absurdity was new. I was bone-tired, but life was looking up. Something to smile about, at least.

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 where all you want is sleep yet you can't, won't, don't want to drift there because there had been not enough time in the day to enjoy yourself. So you do anything other than sleep. The setting sun and 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 did hurt a little too much. 

Weekends were more dreaded than Mondays now. Sleep seemed exponentially harder to come by as each day ended, eyes growing more insomniac by the minute, but one deep breath of nicotine and a guitar strum later, the beep of my phone and the name flashing on the screen crossed a smile onto my face. It was one that had been long missing since summer had rolled in and swept her away from my immediate world, and what I wanted most then was some comforting company to distract me from the all-so-familiar ever-repeating argument that had left me so on edge to begin with.

"Hey, I just got an idea," Olivia's voice, barely audible over the noise in the background, exploded from my speakers and replaced the music I'd been jamming along to. Another party, no doubt. She was a social moth, forever amidst people. "It might be crazy."

An instinctive nervousness settled in my gut, and nascent curiosity in my heart; there was always something about her that made me say yes even if her madcap ideas sounded like sheer idiocy and trod a fine line between silly and 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, disheveled and bleeding, grinning into the mirror while wiping away the evidence of my bizarre morning. And maybe that was exactly what made everything humorous—that all I had done was trade one form of chaos for another.

My out-of-boredom cigarette was almost reaching its end when knocks came to the door and startled me out of my life contemplation. I had half a mind to ignore it, but the voice of my best friend questioningly calling my name had me snuffing out the last ash, flicking what remained of it out the window, and hurrying her inside while hiding behind the door.

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

"I looked everywhere—what the?" Olivia's wide eyes scanned my mangled figure, 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."

"You're a life sav—Liv, no." The words evaporated. "Please tell me this is a joke."

She raised her hands in a conciliatory gesture. "You haven't unpacked yet. I couldn't find anything else."