Spin Cycle

FIVE

• V  THANKSGIVING • 

        ADDISON RELAPSES ON FRIDAY MORNING.

        The act of it doesn't surprise her - she knows this cycle well by now. It's commonplace in her life, sex and weed and newspaper crossword puzzles and all the things that distract, keep her mind from unsnarling itself from its own maze. There's no beginning and no end anymore, just junctions and dead ends. It's best that way, to always be searching, to never feel like escape from this reality is imminent. Hope is a dangerous construct.

       It has teeth devised to gnaw.

      She wakes up next to the maintenance boy from the fourth floor, the one who doesn't know female anatomy well enough to give her an orgasm but knows enough to know that she doesn't care to wait around for him to try. Their agreement isn't based upon the success or failure of getting off, the end result; it never has been. Addison can't bring herself to care about that part. Not in this place, at least, with the generic boy whose hot skin is stuck to her naked thigh, factory line assembled and straight toothed and preened. She's trying to numb, not detonate, keep the pins of these grenades stuck up behind the ribcage, shadowed in places that feel and connect and want things they shouldn't.

     She couldn't possibly fall in love with this – mediocre morning sex and one-sided conversations that serve only to ease the mood, preserve the candor like foul pickles in brine. It's for this reason that she craves it so much. There is safety in the dullness, in the knowledge that he could waltz out of her life and she wouldn't think twice, wouldn't pause to miss the little things about him, like buttering both sides of burnt sourdough or chewing on pen caps; there is nothing built to miss in the first place.

      Addison slinks out from the covers and heads for the shower. The boy in her bed stirs but doesn't wake. Her head pounds; hangover ensuing, a result of highbrow conversation with Kira Winters and one too many glasses of Merlot. The water trickles down over her eyelids, leaving scorching trails of heat, and she becomes taken by the thought that she wouldn't mind having another. Hangover, she means, of the type caused by a short-haired trigonometric girl and cheap alcohol. It's a tempting combination of things. Woman and booze.

      Addison scrubs down her arms, lathering thick silvery bubbles onto planes of desert wasteland. Each stroke brushes the fingerprints of those who have touched her from her body – to begin anew.

      She likes this. To believe there is such a thing as deleting the traces of the people who have once touched her. Like the prints of certain hands haven't already seeded themselves beneath the skin and bloomed outwards. Perhaps she's romanticized by the notion of it. Of removing another human from every present fibre of her being, so that no evidence could be found of them existing there in the first place.

      Did they ever exist?

      Something pricks at her underneath the surface then, tickles the spaces between her ribs, trying to strum at something that hasn't been played in some time. It's off key and sounds to the tune of static memories and Addison's quick to shake the feeling away. It is too familiar. She knows to give into it would shake the dust; ooze that black matter out from the shadows.

      It's Ellie Reed in her eardrum, poetic prose, coy between the bed sheets, soft lips on an earlobe, whispering meaningless words that felt meaningful in the moments they escaped her tongue in that eloquent syntax of hers.

      You know I've never loved anyone like I love you, right?

      That's the thing about words – they're just words, empty vessels alluding to being something greater only when done up just right. Ellie did a lot of that – strung things up the right way.