Drugs

Chapter One

I loved once. I loved once so entirely that my bones ached at her passing, and my heart leapt from my chest at every word she ever spoke. I was a different man then, though. Losing her molded me into something I didn't recognize and couldn't love. Which is why, when I tell you what I did, you must understand. I wasn't the same person without her, and in fact most nights I wasn't even sure I was a person at all.

It began at the end, with the ethereal, eternal, ephemeral vision of her face. She was pale and unflinching, her perfectly small nose even with my own. Her pale blue eyes, unblinking, bore deeply into mine, piercing my psyche and putting my soul to its knees. Her hair, bright and red like a beautiful sun, extended and twisted and floated all about as if we were underwater. It was only in that moment that I realized we were, in fact, underwater. Behind her, the sun glared down mockingly, a visible harbor just beyond the hurricane. We both were going to die. I knew we were dying, and I could only be happy. I was, after all, with her. She must have known it, too, with the way she looked so desperately for my heart through my eyes. I reached out for her, my pale, cold hands longed for her skin. My left arm wrapped around her slim waist, where it had rested a thousand times before, and pulled her close to me. Her gaze never broke as her perfect little nose touched my own, less perfect nose. Slowly, and with great care, my right hand came to her face, some of my fingers lingering comfortably upon her upper neck. I needed to kiss her. If it was the very last thing I did in life, I knew I had to kiss her. I pulled her in, even closer. The space between our embrace and the kiss was so familiar to me. I knew her lips like I knew myself, but it felt strange. Almost as if, for a moment, I didn't know her at all. I closed my eyes and prepared for the electric connection that we always shared. But I never got to kiss her.

I jolted upright in an instant, drenched in sweat and calling sharply for breath. With an abrupt pull, I woke up into a world above water and beneath empty sheets, where the air is crisp and cool, and the air smells like the ocean. It was my home, but from the very first day it felt unfamiliar to me. When I was even younger, I truly believed that California would be an escape for me. After a year or so, I realized that I was only trying to drown my critical mistakes in the Pacific deep. I stayed, though. There wasn't any reason for me to stay, hundreds of miles away from my family and my true friends, and of course from her, but I stayed. Something about the sound of the ocean through my open window, or the late night walks paved by bourbon and sand between my toes kept me reasonably satisfied.

I couldn't have gotten more than three hours of sleep, but I was wide awake. My bloodshot eyes strained to recognize the bright red display on the other side of my otherwise empty bed. "3:32" it sang, blinking in an unsettlingly ominous fashion. Sighing and trying fruitlessly to rub the sleep from my eyes, I got out of bed and began to roam the cold, dark hallways of my home.

By no mistake, it was a rather beautiful house. Equipped with all the standard conveniences of an exceptionally modern house, I certainly couldn't have been more comfortable. It was, however, particularly uninviting after dark. The shadows lingered at every corner, and much longer than they should be allowed. Furniture sulked, stationary and menacing like waiting hounds. A coat rack stood, erect and slender like the devil himself, waiting by the door with an invitation into the world. The back door, however, was always unguarded, and it put my bare feet in the soft, shady sand.

The ocean breeze caressing my loose, hanging hair, I pulled out an age-old metal lighter. The front was engraved with the image of an old compass. It was the lighter I always used to smoke weed. Low and behold, my free left hand lifted a carefully constructed blunt to my lips. I knew then that getting monumentally high was the only surefire way of getting any kind of sleep. Sleep, anyways, that wasn't entirely haunted by her face. Within ten minutes, I had burned just shy of two grams of grade A, best quality bud. For at least the next hour, I knew I'd be soaring. The whole thing seemed suitably ironic, but it never failed me. Being high was also the only way I ever managed to get any work done. Less than an hour later, I was seated at my desk behind the invasively bright display of my monitors, typing quite furiously. I had decided to start entirely over again.

I loved once. I loved once so entirely that my bones ached at her passing, and my heart leapt from my chest at every word she ever spoke. I was a different man then, though. Losing her molded me into something I didn't recognize and couldn't love. Which is why, when I tell you what I did, you must understand. I wasn't the same person without her, and in fact most nights I wasn't even sure I was a person at all.

Karen and I first met during the tentative, routinely awkward years of high school. In a small place where each moment was a pure reflection of the world outside, Karen was like a beacon of light to a weary sailor. She was unfailingly and refreshingly realistic. She was incredibly bright, perhaps too much so for her own good. And most of all, she was fierce as all hell. There wasn't a fight that she didn't come out on top of.

I remember so distinctly the night that we first met. It was one of those fantastic nights where the haze behind passing suburban street lights reminded me that nothing whatsoever could go wrong. I arrived, near midnight and after a high school theatre production, at Denny's. It was a tradition for cast members to get breakfast after the final show of any given production. There was, of course, a number of people who had simply enjoyed the show and were granted an in by some cast member or another. This was Karen. When I sat down, she was sitting at the head of five tables pushed together to accommodate about 25 rowdy students. She was chatting intimately with my good friend, Ian.

When I saw her, I knew that there was nothing more important than me meeting her. Even after a year of dating her, I never told her that. I never told her that I had really loved her from the very moment I laid eyes on her. That was just the way things went with us, though. I always did much more for her than she realized and she remained, intentionally, outside of the realm of realization. Ian, at my request, introduced me to her.

"Kimball, this is Karen, Karen this is Kimball" Ian said gleefully. I awkwardly extended my hand for her to shake, and she simply looked nervously at it.

"I, uh, don't touch" she said, glancing down to avoid meeting my eyes.

"Yeah, uh, Karen doesn't really like touching so much" Ian said, failing to repair our first encounter. it would be over a year before I would see her again, but she would never leave my thoughts all that while.

Ten minutes of writing passed by like an eternity as I sat, motionless, grasping after the lingering wisps of my imagination. Suddenly, I stopped. I wrote perhaps a single page before returning to bed and falling instantly into a dreamless sleep.