Okay, please, nobody steal this, or the idea in itself. If I've ever written anything I actually liked, this is it. Enjoy.-------------------------------
All Fixed Up
I'm sitting in an empty room overflowing with empty people. None of them realize they're not the only one here - except of course for me, but that's just because the girl with the red hair and tight, overly revealing shorts hasn't brought me my fix yet. It's sad, now, to look at them, all lost in their petty fantasies, running away blindly from everything they're too yellow to face, but it won't be in a minute. It won't be when the red-headed girl comes back with my petty fantasies in a paper cup, my escape mixed in with the water. Then it won't be half as pathetic as it is now.
I can't see the ceiling through all the smoke. I'm here so much, almost every day for the past two years, and I've never seen the ceiling once. Sometimes I think there isn't one, but that's impossible, because this building has two stories. Sometimes I ignore that and pretend that the people upstairs in the cutting rooms are walking on the thick, dense smoke from the stoners down here - also impossible. Most of the time I just see the smoke and forget about it, pretending I'm not really there - again - that I'm lying next my Lia at home, at our home, watching her sleep prettily, peacefully. That's the thing that's ridiculous as well as impossible. Beautiful, sweet, straightedge Lia is long long gone. I'm as happy for her as I am miserable for me. I'm glad that she got away when she could. I'm glad she doesn't have to watch me do this anymore. I'm glad that I don't have to go home and fight with her every night, to watch her cry and beg me to stop poisoning myself, to do it for myself and her and just stop, to scream at her and listen to her scream at me, to go to bed angry and only be able to tell her how much she means to me and how much I wish I could clean up just for her while she was asleep. But God, I miss her. Sometimes, when I really ache for a fix, I talk to her even though she's not there, telling her this is the time I'm not going to go back, this is the time I'm really going to get clean and then we can be together again. But I always end up back here, sitting in the same spot, noticing the smoke that is the ceiling.
Red-Head appears, slinking her way through the dark crowd, carrying a syringe, a rubber tie, and a paper cup with a metal spoon bathing in it. My heart beats in anxious couplets, anticipating the thrill of freedom running through my veins on its highway to hell up through my brain. She kneels by the broken down chair I'm sitting in and pulls my arm gently until she can work on it easier, which pulls me until I'm leaning on my knees, one needle-ruined forearm painfully pressed against rough jean. The tie goes tight around my bicep, carefully avoiding all the track marks there, and her reluctantly skilled hands try to work up a good vein. I look down at her while she's struggling to drag up something useable and she looks tired, like she's been here all day and all night and not allowed any sleep, and her eyes look tortured, like she's seen too many things that she's much too young to know about, let alone see, and her hair is frazzled and crazy and I can guess off the top of my head what she's been up to so far on her shift. Normally I would care. I would ask her what she was doing to herself, working in a place like this. For God's sake, she couldn't be older than sixteen. Where were her parents? But it doesn't really matter right now. Everything in me is straining toward where the syringe and paper cup are sitting, straining for tonight's dose, straining toward the cure for the monophonic scream that's running around in my brain, beating the white walls and begging.
Her fingers stop massaging my arm and run quickly through her hair, messing it up even worse. Raccoon eyes glance up at me from beneath heavy lids, the spark in them a little worried, a little scared, a little anxious.
"Listen," she says, and her voice is high and quiet like a flute, "I can't find anything in your arm, and judging from the way you're holding the other one there isn't anything there either, so I'm probably going to have to go in through your neck."
I smile a crooked smile and nod. "Whatever you think is best, doctor." My voice quivers and shakes. This is taking too long. Too long too long too long. I've been waiting and waiting and the dope is right there, and I'm still down, and the girl is right there and I'm still. down.
I try to calm down, to stop freaking out, it'll just be a minute after all, the girl is doing the best she can, it's not her fault I've been using for so long and all my veins are pretty much destroyed it'll just be a minute, and my breaths are getting shallower and shallower. I start to get real scared until I find the wandering thread of control that scream is running around with in my head and I pull it back, tight, so I don't have a panic attack right here in front of everybody. The girl isn't even looking at me. She's filling the syringe with my Hero, my savior, and I watch her with what I think is a hungry look, but I don't really know and I don't really care all that much. I just see the syringe filled with not-quite-clear fluid slowly approaching my neck and the scorched silver of the spoon retreating back to its pool of heavenly water, having done all it can for me, and I want to grab the needle and shove it into the hollow between my chin and the start of my throat and press down the plunger, press it down and run away away away. I don't want to be here anymore, in this pitiful place where pitiful people go to do pitiful things, and smoke is the ceiling, and there isn't any electricity so when the sun goes down and the blackness of the night swallows the world you can only see two inches in front of your own lit cigarette, and when it's light out you wish it was dark because the people in here make you want to scream and scream and run and never stop. I want to be in that light warm place where Lia still is and where I can smile and be happy and feel things other than a constant craving, a constant hunger for the poison that kills me and killed her and just kills everything it touches and I don't want to be here anymore please, Red-Head, just do it. Just do it.
Finally her hand disappears and I feel a sudden fiery pain underneath my skin and my breath sucks in like the stage in an A-Bomb explosion that rips trees back and destroys houses, then nothing. All I see in front of me is Red-Head in a white background, and she looks disappointed and a little annoyed that this is taking so long because it's probably costing her money to just sit here, and then I close my eyes and it's not Red-Head, it's Lia, it's my Lia. My heart beats double and she smiles at me and leans on my knees, and her face is so close to mine that I can feel her hot, moist breath on my skin, and she smells like flowers and springtime, and I lean forward to kiss her but she's gone. She's gone. I look around for her, but I can't find her and then suddenly she's sitting in a chair facing away from me and I smile and run to her and spin the chair around on its wheels, then wish I hadn't. Her lips aren't smiling at me, they're frozen in a pained grimace, but the mouth that's ripped into her throat is, and her face is still wet with tears from her gray, filmy eyes, and I killed her. The straightrazor is right beneath her sliced-up fingers on the floor, but I killed her and my heart is in my throat now and I vaguely remember yelling in her face something about how she sucks all the light out of a room and how much I wished I'd never met her, but I didn't mean it, I was high when I said it and look what it did look what I did, look what I did here Mom, all by myself, and…
My eyes snapped open and I heard rather than felt myself hyperventalating. Bad, bad, bad. I can still see her there, just in the distance, those two mouths one smiling and one not and I can't take it it mustnot have been enough wasn't enough wasn't enough i needed her to shoot me up-
"Again," I gasp to Red-Head, who is staring at me like she isn't sure whether I'm dying or not, but she gets the spoon again and the syringe, and she injects me again just like I told her.
I feel myself go numb and Lia in the chair fades away. I finally feel relaxed and my breath slowly hisses out and it says, 'I love you,' in this way that's relieved and forceful at the same time. Through drug-weighted eyelids I see Red-Head smile and climb into my lap just as slowly.
"You're not so bad yourself," she whispers in my ear and I hear her like I'm under water and she isn't but I don't really care, because I wasn't talking about her and because she's just doing her job. Her voice is thick and raspy and I feel her lips press against my jaw bone and my cheek, and then she finds my lips and I want to stop her, but I can't lift my arms. I can't move. It's wonderfully terrible, because I don't want to kiss her, she's not Lia and I don't want to kiss anyone but Lia, but I don't want to break this calm. I've worked so hard, hurt so much for this calm.
So I let her kiss me and my eyes slowly start to close, and the second blackness eats away my sight Lia comes back. At first she's just a little doll far away in the distance, but then she sees me sitting here and she smiles bigger than I've ever seen her smile and she runs to me in that weird slow-motion you only see in acid-trip music videos from the 1960's. I watch her and watch her and I want to get up to meet her in the middle but I can't, everything feels so heavy, and I try to call her name but my mouth is stuck and I can't remember why. Her eyes are right in front of mine all of the sudden, all green and sparkly, and I smile a little through my stuck lips and kiss her, hard, because I feel like I haven't in a long long time and the jumpy thrill of the high finally kicks in. She's warm underneath my hands and a little flag goes up in the back of my head that tells me there's something very wrong with that, but I ignore it because it's Lia, my Lia. There hasn't ever been anything wrong with her. Even as I think this, I'm recognizing little things about how she moves and how she settles, her flat stomach that's soft and hard at the same time, her habit of playing with the hair that lies at the nape of my neck, twisting it and pulling it between her fingers, and how she always complains she's cold but she feels so warm she's so warm like home, and her long, wavy hair curtains my face and there's black again.
I'm sitting on the counter back in the apartment, watching Lia make grilled cheeses in our dilapitated old frying pan. She's really good at making them crispy and golden and perfect every time. I always burn them up so they're half charcoal by the time they get to the table, and then we have to choke them down because there's no wasting food when you're not sure if you'll have money for food tomorrow. We recently came up with a plan for grilled cheese night - she makes the sandwiches and I handle opening the soup with our handheld can opener that's about as old as we are. It works well. We actually get to taste what we eat. She flips a sandwich out of the pan and on to a plate, then drops her spatula. I stop spinning the little lever on the can opener and look up at her, a little worried that something's wrong. She yanks off her apron and spins around, but I can't see her face because her hair is hiding it from me, and she stops right in front of me and takes the soup can out of my hand - tomato for her and chicken noodle for me, always tomato for her and chicken noodle for me and we share, I remember - and she throws it against the wall. It splatters all over the place, painting the kitchen the color of muscle, and I start to say something but she darts up and covers my mouth with hers and shoves me back on the counter, and now through her sheet of hair I can see her quietly laughing so I laugh too. We're playing a game. A messy, wasteful game, but a game nonetheless. I grab the container of butter off the little patch of bare wood next to the stove top that we keep saying we need to get fixed and I smear it all over her face, and she takes it from me and really rubs a big glob of it into my skin. She laughs and forces me onto my back and she kisses it off, laughing and laughing, and we're both laughing both happy and she doesn't know that I'm high. She doesn't know. I won't tell her, but later she'll figure out that my eyes look different and we'll fight and all this will be forgotten in the screams and swears and threats.
My eyes open. It's not really Lia. It's Red-Head. My heart drops and drops and drops and twists into a little, shrieking ball and I remember burying Lia last spring underneath that big tree she used to like so much and everybody blamed me and they were right to. My lungs ache. I'm starting to come down. All this pressure is bringing me down. I look at Red-Head's twisted locks and will them to be long and wavy-blond, and I make her scrawny little body swell and fill out and become Lia's, trying to save the high. After a little while of wishing with all my might, I can't tell the difference.
What are you doing, honey-love? Lia's voice echoes in my head. My pet name gouges itself into my skin and stings there even though, somewhere, I know it's not really Lia talking to me.
Nothing, sugar, I think back as hard and as loud as I can. Nothing at all. I'm at home with you and we're okay. Everything's okay. Everything's okay. I'm with you, and we're at home, and I'm all cleaned up and all fixed up and we're married and the kids are asleep and everything's okay. I'm all fixed up and I love you.
I break the kiss and look at her, at her grass-green eyes and her beach blond hair that gently waves over her forehead, and I smile because I love her so much, because everything's okay. She's here with me and I'm clean as a whistle and and we're all fixed up.
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"Pt. 2 - Joy" to come very soon
