Chasing Butterflies

Glacial

Laughter floated through the dingy apartment. Two figures lay tangled on the couch; another sprawled out on the cold floor. They lay beneath a bare, flickering bulb that swung from the ceiling, failing to stifle their unexplained giggles. Smoke swirled through the air, tangling itself against Izzy's fingers.

Cassie fell against the worn couch cushions as her boyfriend sat up. "Jae, where are you going?" She whined in a nasally tone that scratched at Izzy's ears. He ignored her, instead groaning as he dragged himself off the couch and towards the fridge, prying open the rusty handle.

"Damn it. Babe, you're out of beer," he slammed the fridge door closed, barely able to stay on his feet. The three of them had spent nearly two days in Cassie's apartment, drinking all the liquor in her fridge and getting higher than the clouds. It was no surprise that all the alcohol had been consumed already. The burning in Izzy's throat, caused by their last round of shots, had faded and she needed another hit.

Izzy lay on the ground, sprawled on her back. She stared up at the ceiling with a vacant expression. For the first time in a long while she was still, calm even. Her red eyes followed specks of dust as they crumbled away from the water-stained ceiling and crashed down on the floor around her. It had taken two days, a series of mystery pills supplied by Jae, and fifteen rounds of cheap liquor to achieve this state. She knew it was wrong. But she couldn't find it in herself to care.

"Hey Izzy, could you run to the store and buy some more beer?" Cassie pleaded, making a face that looked to be somewhere between a pout and a case of constipation. Jae joined in on her request, voicing his need for tequila.

Izzy couldn't think of anything she wanted to do less than that. It was almost midnight and she just wanted to lie on floor and hope for sleep to take over. The couple kept pestering her, their words made her jaw clench in annoyance.

"Fine." She would go to the store. Even if was only to get away from them for half an hour. Hauling her heavy limbs up from the ground felt like trying to lift a metric ton of cinderblocks. Regardless, Izzy grabbed a few crumpled bills from the table and shoved them into her pocket, then took a hit from an already lit joint and stumbled to the door. Jae collapsed on the couch beside Cassie just as Izzy slammed the door closed behind her.

She stumbled her way down the stairs, out of the building door, and into the night. Izzy moved fast, placing one cinderblock foot in front of the other. Her foggy mind couldn't keep up. Buildings and streets blurred together in a haze of blacks and grays. The world looked like it was spinning around her, making her grow dizzy.

Izzy tumbled through the door of a dusty little convenience store. A middle aged guy with a sandpaper beard and a vacant expression sat uncaring at the counter. She made her way to the back of the store where the beer and the oh-so classy boxed wine was.

She grabbed a six pack of beer, a bottle of cheap tequila and shuffled to the cash register, struggling not to look as high as she actually was.

"That's $12.55," the cashier grumbled out, his breath reeking of cigarette smoke. Izzy pulled out a few crumpled bills from the pocket of her jeans and threw them on the counter. Not waiting for the change, she grabbed the alcohol and dragged herself out the door.

She made her way back through the deserted city streets, the handle of the plastic grocery bag digging into her frozen fingers. She hadn't thought to take a jacket when she left the apartment. And that was one of many decisions she was beginning to regret.

After what felt like years, but in reality was only a few minutes, Izzy finally hauled her tired body up the stairs of Cassie's building. Her fingers were frozen but still managed to scratch anxiously against the side seam of her jeans. The high was wearing off and a jittery panic was digging itself into the darkest, coldest corners of her mind, making her head ache and her lungs constrict painfully.

The building door wasn't even fully shut. Izzy didn't bother ringing the apartment bell. She simply made her way up the stairs, pausing once again in front of the peeling red door of Cassie's apartment. Izzy didn't know how long she stood there, just staring at the wood, waiting. She waited for her brain to work, for the gears to turn and generate a course of action for her to follow. But her mind was blank.

Her hand reached out for the doorknob then stopped.

The sound on the other side of the door could have been someone stubbing their toe on the coffee table. But Izzy knew it wasn't. Groans reverberated through the apartment and drifted past the crack under the door. As much as she didn't want to go into the dorm earlier, she sure as hell wasn't going to go in now. She couldn't simply walk in and claim ignorance when she knew what they were doing. She didn't want to be there. And she sure didn't want to witness that. And as much as she hated it, memories of sitting on a living room couch, waiting for her ex-boyfriend to finish with his new girl flooded her brain.

Izzy bent down, lowering the bag of alcohol to the ground in front of the peeling red door. She turned away and walked out of the building.

For what felt like hours Izzy stumbled through the streets. Neon bar signs flashed in and out of her vision. Drunk couples bumped into her as they spilled out of underground clubs. Her head spun from the noise they made. She's right back where she started: wandering around the city at night, desperate for a place to crash. Two days after she'd been dumped and nothing had changed. Had she really expected something to change? Maybe she didn't want anything to change. A part of her wanted to keep living the way she had been the past two days. No worries, nothing and no one to stress over. Nothing but smoke in her lungs and liquor on her tongue. It was simple that way. It was easy.

Izzy finally came to a shaky stop, a railway station sign coming into focus in her bleary eyes, the words covered by layers of spray paint, there was something familiar about it but she couldn't quite place it. She couldn't remember which direction she had come from or where she had planned to go. Actually she didn't have a plan at all. And that meant there was nothing stopping her from going into that railway.

It was even colder inside the stain than it was outside but Izzy didn't care. It was quiet. It was empty. With the guarantee that no one would be passing though, it was exactly what she needed. The cold pierced her skin but she couldn't feel it as she scratched at her arms. She hadn't known that withdrawal could hit this fast. Her body collapsed on a rusty old bench beside the empty train tracks.

Izzy closed her eyes and left her mind to wander. She allowed the world to fade away as she fell to sleep, shivering on that old bench. She couldn't hear and couldn't see the two figures that now walked beneath the withered entrance.

They made their way through the station, joking and laughing as they went. They walked effortlessly, knowing every piece of twisted metal that hung from the ceiling, every crack in the concrete foundation, every piece of trash that lay on the ground of this abandoned railway stop.

The two men jerked to a halt beside a bench. As well as they knew this station, they didn't know the girl that lay on that bench.

"Who the hell is that?" The taller one questioned.

"How would I know, Hoseok?" His friend shot back.

"Nobody's supposed to know about this place. How did she even get here?"

"I don't know," he took in the sight of a girl lying on the freezing railway station bench. The temperature had dropped overnight and the air felt glacial.

"She looks cold." He began to pull off his jacket, leaving himself in just a plain white shirt.

"Jimin what are hell are you doing?" His friend looked at him like he had gone mad.

Jimin draped his jacket over her, "Well we can't just let her freeze to death."

"We also can't let her stay here. The guys are supposed to meet us here. They're not gonna be too happy if they know some random girl found our place." Hoseok's normal joking tone had disappeared, replaced by cold realism.

"Then call them and tell them to meet us back at the apartment. Come on," Jimin threw an arm over Hoseok's shoulders, leading his friend out of crumbling railway station.