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 and drown out mistakes under the freezing water, I could still feel the grime ingrained in my skin. Even in self-awareness and the realization of being a disaster, there was nothing but laughter—little spurts of joy that spilled over as if they had been building up in some corner for a long time, waiting for release. This was new. To laugh out of amusement, and not the hollow, acidic kind that had become familiar during recent 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 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. 

I always seemed to dread weekends more now than I did Mondays, and that was saying something, and that feeling never really went away. Sleep was getting harder to come by as each day ended, my eyes growing more insomniac by the minute, 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 put 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 family argument that had left me so on edge to begin 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 saturate my gut, and nascent curiosity 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 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 in such disaster, a strange and twisted humor of some kind still shone through, as if I had traded one form of chaos for another.

My cigarette was almost reaching its end when knocks came to the door and startled me out of my daze. I had half a mind to ignore it, but the voice of my best friend calling my name was a welcome relief. I snuffed out the last ash, flicked 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."