Snow

46 | julian called it snow

❝i think i came to find the feeling,
baby, between what was mine
and what was yours.❞

❘❘

THERE ARE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF, Emmy tells me, pero no le creo. Grief doesn't work in stages; it works in waves, returning to the shore each day, a constant ebb and flow of rough tides and gentle waters, but... always there.

Grief is eternal.

There are five stages in addiction, Emmy tells me next, como si significara algo. I don't know how many fucking stages there are because I don't know... what that means. Is there a moment—a stage—when I lose all control of my actions? Is there a singular second in that fucking spiral when it becomes an all-encompassing need? Was it one of those nights, skidding into dependence, when it consumed me? How does it start? How does it end?

No sé.

What I know is that grief and addiction lean on each other. They can be tethered together into a blissful distraction, a temporary anecdote, a beautiful deception that helps destroy everything that is... wrong.

For a moment, an intricately intimate infinity, a fleeting forever, nothing hurts, and nothing will ever hurt again.

It's nothing but a smoke screen, a foggy filter, a trap—ensnaring lost souls into the chaste kiss of euphoria. Because when I wake up in the afternoon, when I fall asleep in the early morning, when I battle shitty decisions and fucked up impulses, violence and nausea and depression and anxiety, I'm still grieving.

Escapism only means trading heartache for hollow hope. It still hurts when the high fades, when holes puncture the haze, when oxygen strangles and suffocates, when lights dim, when bones break, when fingers numb, when everything is fucking real.

Somehow, we always meet at the shore, like the tide, and as the waves of anguish wash over me, salt stings the open wounds from another fucking fall.

We always crash.

This is forever, and maybe one day, I'll learn to live with it—with him being gone, with me being... me.

Sólo han pasado veinte minutos, and I'm clawing out of my skin, a twisting, churning pain gnawing at my heart, gnashing teeth, ripping, tearing through muscles and—

Only twenty fucking minutes, and I'm already crashing. Every little promise I whispered in Emmy's dimly lit bathroom is gone, fading, unraveling into the fierce wind lapping at my cheeks. Debería haber sabido. Two hits wouldn't last; two hits would only leave me cold and miserable in the heart of an arctic kingdom, swaying and stumbling, coughing, clinging to Emmy for warmth.

As we sway down the sidewalk, arms linked and fingers laced, my head swims. Soft, flickering lights cut through the blue haze of winter; a faint glow embraces the iron fence lovingly. Something gentle carries the luminescence into the darkness, threatening the shades of gray that paint the city into a monochromatic mass of a million silhouettes. Candles.

There's blood still staining gravel—a dull sea saturating the surface of the entrance to the basketball court, a tattoo, inked, ingrained into the concrete jungle that stole Julian Rivera.

Emmy tugs at my arm gently, and I bite back a cry, twisting in her grasp to run, run, run. We were going to leave; we were going to run.

Maybe we would have gone north, like we talked about on those late nights, and we would have settled in Canada. Maybe we would have been cold; maybe we would have found snow.