Snow

3 | we call it snow, neva

❝the velvet, it rips, in the city we tripped
on the urge to feel alive,
but now i'm struggling to survive.❞

❘❘

I FEEL LIKE I'M FLYING, coasting along an overpass that looks down on a dying metropolis and a million fleeting colors.

This city is always moving and changing and blurring in a faintly fatal dream, but in this moment, as short-lived as it is, New York has no heartbeat.

Only I do.

As I twist through the heady air of a cramped apartment, flares stagger in my wake and I burn through smoke like a dead star.

All the colors blend together into a fuzzy image, off kilter and skewed with a faded filter that keeps me squinting. A flash of fabric, a flicker of a smile, a whip of long hair, a glimpse of a tattoo... spiraling into something that rushes, rushes, rushes through my veins in the most volatile and violent way.

Cocaine.

It feels beautiful and disastrous, like an explosion of atoms that will never stitch themselves back together. A damage that will never be healed.

And with it, I feel like I can take over the world. I feel dizzy and destructive and dreamy — no longer inhibited by rules or reality, nothing but the scent of sweat and the streak of smoke.

"Neva," Julian says in a husky voice, drawing me away from the raw confines of my own mind; the sensations that send me reeling. "Hey, Neva."

My legs tighten around his waist, my heart claws up my throat in the form of a thousand frantic kisses.

I devour his low chuckle as if it's the only thing that will keep me alive and breathing. Maybe it isn't, but it feels synonymous with oxygen and the mileage of an impermanent high.

Tendrils of heat lick along the skin where his fingers flutter, searing snakes and scorched butterflies that sneak into my bloodstream. The feeling traps me in his arms.

"Ungh, yes..."

Somewhere behind me, someone laughs — or I laugh. I think it's me, but underneath the haze of a rapture, an ascent into euphoria, I can't tell. All that matters is that my fingers find his collar and they desperately tug to find the tattoos that sleep beneath soft material.

I'm aching from my core, trembling and thrashing within myself to touch him or myself or anyone.

"Neva, Neva, Neva," he breathes the word into my mouth, and it withers like the red-hot ashes of what's left of that person.

Everything starts to fall away too quickly. Buildings tumble and the wind rattles my bones with an ice-cold bite that nearly steals my breath.

The city remains beneath my feet.

I'm still floating, I'm still feeling, I'm still loving.

But my toes graze a cold surface and my heart plummets into an arctic ocean at the pit of my stomach, rising with the tides to flood over me. It's cold. Nothing is supposed to be cold.

Julian is moving me, he's guiding me across a sheet of ice and I'm gasping—I'm talking—I'm saying something—but the words don't string together into real sentences.

They're fractured like my thoughts, they're broken like me.

Chills break loose as the flames wane. I shiver in his arms, search for him, or for me, or for anything. I can't tell because the temperature is dropping and I'm suddenly spinning and spinning and spinning.