the aftermath

the aftermath - one shot

It is three thirty two in the morning, and I am here.

I can hear the trolley from where I'm sitting, our living room couch, steaming cup of tea in my hand. I could never get a liking for the stuff, no matter how many times you told me the taste was acquired eventually, smile on your face like a spotlight I didn't mind standing in. You always loved green tea with honey. It is the type of drink that always leaves you with a bitter taste in your mouth, no matter how much sugar you put in to try to sweeten it. The television flashes as the colours show on the screen, some sort of rerun of an old crime drama that used to be all the rage back in 2006. Darkness weeps from the walls like this building was a pair of eyes all its own, and the shades of black are just mascara dripping from the lashes of the night sky. My eyes are raccoons as well, the shadows round them becoming a bandit mask in all its glory.

It has been six months, sixteen days, and seven hours since you left me, and yet each night, I leave my door unlocked for you. I keep waiting for you, a vicious cycle of insomnia and tears and constant analyzation of the past. The boxes of Marlboros, scattered on the floor of the balcony like confetti, are the visible bits of evidence of my failed attempts to find a sense of catharsis. Mani and Ally haven't seen the small plastic bags filled with powder in my set of drawers, hidden under the underwear, next to the grey pair of socks. As long as I leave the house once a week, they seem to be satisfied with being the type of friends I need right now, the people who have become masters at watching others self destruct before their eyes, but still refuse to do anything about it. I have spent the past year and a half creating roots with you, trying to force myself to bloom, to become better. Now it's time to let the scientists prove themselves right, time to succumb to the inevitability of entropy.

You never know if you've hit your rock bottom of life until you reach that point, skull and spine sore from the impact of the fall, still stunned and wondering, how the hell did I let myself get here in the first place?

Two weeks ago, I saw him wearing the oversized shirt I gave you. He's a pseudo songwriter type of guy with an old guitar he picked up off of Craigslist. He told me when I first met him that The 1975 was never really his type of music. You have everything. The t-shirts, the dog, the old CDs of demos I wrote and made for you for Valentine's Day. All I am left with is the shoddy apartment, the couch, and our bed. Still unmade, littered with the parts of you I ripped out from my closet but was too cowardly to throw away. I am so scared to throw the parts of you away, too scared to say goodbye when all I've done over these past few months is forget how to live without you more and more. You have become a dependence, and now I cannot say goodbye to the faint smell of citrus and bananas, the Ed Sheeran albums you bought me for my birthday last year. I am hoarding these memories of you, because it's all I have left of you.

Ten days ago, I remembered the way you would always trip over nothing, the way I loved to laugh at all your lame jokes just to see you smile, how one night we looked at the sunset together and told each other those Game of Thrones terms of endearment because everyone was doing it nowadays, and you loved the show so much that you begged me to call you my sun and stars at least once. You told me you liked it, but it didn't stick. It was a shame. I liked the thought of being the moon of your life. I downed the memories with two bags of Munchos potato chips, eighty nine cent soda that says hecho en Mexico on the label, and a box of Marlboros. That night I made the twenty minute drive to the local high school that has the football field on top of the hill. The people I call my acquaintances met me there, and we climbed to the top of the hill, a fledgling mountain whose summit is littered with liquor bottles and more cigarettes and traces of things only high schoolers would call an adventure in itself. They handed me the LSD pills, and I took them.

When I told Ally and Mani three days later that I had seen a tsunami, and it's as terrifying as the movies say it is, they only assumed it was a nightmare of some sort. I made no effort to correct them.