PERFECT PLACES

Cole (9)

He knocked on her door the next day in the afternoon. He knew that she had told him not to come, but he had no choice. He hadn't eaten yet because of how guilty he was feeling. There were bags under his eyes because he hadn't slept at all last night.

Last night, after he left Sarah's room, he ran down the stairs to get outside. He pushed the doors open and let out a scream into the night. A janitor saw him and stared at him for a long time, until he was far away. He walked away from campus so that the janitor didn't call campus security. He walked toward the water.

By the shore, he just walked and walked, further and further from campus. He didn't know where he was going. He just knew that while he was still high and that he had to be somewhere else. Going back to his room would just make it worse. Thinking about the situation was too much to bear, he thought he was close to having a breakdown. He didn't want to stay inside his head, it was just too hard. His thoughts weren't working correctly.

To get out of his head, Cole had to look out to the water and pretend he wasn't himself. His eyes had to fog over and he had to go away from the reality he was in. He had to become someone completely different. He was no longer Cole, trapped in his cocaine-fueled body with a girlfriend wide-awake and panicking a dozen blocks away, in crisis without him. He was someone else, someone who could look in disgust at Cole's life and completely distance himself from all of it. It would have been too difficult to be Cole. Cole was a horrible person. He became the surface of the water. He became the waves, raising and falling over and over again. He became the clouds, and then the moon. He was trying to be hundreds of miles away from the person standing on the grass that he no longer wanted to know.

He kept knocking with no answer. He didn't expect her to open the door. She might not even be in her room, Cole thought. She could have left and gone somewhere else to avoid him. She probably could have guessed that he was going to come check in on her at some point, even though she had told him not to. He was stubborn and he didn't have a way of knowing if she actually wanted him to come by. But she wasn't answering the door and Cole couldn't hear anyone inside. So she was either keeping very quiet to keep him away, or she actually was gone somewhere.

One thing that Cole did last night was hit himself in the head. As soon as he got back in his room, he was Cole again. He was the disgusting human being that was still very high. So he laid down on his bed and his body started trembling. His fists were clenched hard and he started to get red in the face. Suddenly, he tensed all of the muscles in his whole body. He was trying to escape his body. He was trying to punish himself. So he started hitting himself in the forehead with his open palm. It was only with moderate force at first while his muscles were still tensing. But then he started hitting harder. And soon each time he hit himself it made a loud smacking noise. He hit himself as hard as he could manage this way, a dozen times. At the same time he was quietly yelling at himself. Yelling that he hated himself. Then he got up on his knees and put his hands into a fist and started hitting his thighs, pounding them several times. Then he managed to bring his fist up high enough to start punching his pillow instead. And so he did this twenty or thirty times. His face was still red and he was still yelling at himself as he punched all of his energy into the pillow. He had so much to let out. So much self-hatred to release. Then he fell down onto his bed in exhaustion. His fingers hurt from clenching them for so long. His thighs hurt. He might have given himself a concussion, he didn't know. But he knew he deserved it. And then he fell asleep.

He stopped knocking on her door. It was hopeless, she wasn't there. So he walked down the hall toward the staircase. He would come back again in the evening.