The Drugs Were More Consistent Than You

Monday

I wake at five past six pooled in my own sweat with my heart going like there is a bomb in it about to go off. Another heatwave. They have been coming all summer, one after another, and the sick joke of it is that I prayed for this. I pray for it every spring, for a warm summer and a free one, unburdened, friends and drugs and nothing owed to anybody, and what I am really praying for is the resurrection of stupid, carefree nineteen year old me, Beau and me fucking around with no name on it and raves and open airs every other night. Same prayer every year. This summer he came back, and it still isn’t it. It has been six every morning now, awake and unable to sleep again until midday. Malaise. It is getting annoyingly hard to feel like I have the time for all this sleeping and crying. It is summer, it is hot, and I have been out for one decent tan all month. I go to the window to smoke and it happens to be sunrise. I want to wake hot roommate for it but he doesn’t like being pulled out of his sleep and he is under something strong anyway, so waking him for a sunrise, beautiful, mundane, gone in ten minutes, wouldn’t do anything. I smoke my lonely cigarette. At nineteen there would have been a whole field of people to turn to and now there is a medicated man asleep down the hall and a sky I have no one to hand to. The only time I get out of bed is for more water, and I do it like a ghost, moving so no one knows I am up. I have been lying here taking too much lorazepam and telling him I am sick, that I have all sorts of symptoms, when really it is mostly just malaise. I think I might be bipolar. She has a little remote that works the blinds so I open them without getting up, the slats lifting up and down on their own. This is the free summer. I sleep again and wake sick. Cramps, a fever-ache all through me, and still no period. I go down for water and tell him, the cramps and the sickness, and he says go back up and rest. He is kind like that. The care is real.

On the roof there is a black cat that sits and watches the chickens, and a rooster that drags the whole house awake at sunrise and doesn’t stop for the rest of the day. One of the chickens keeps jumping trying to fly over the fence, too heavy for the sky, Darwinian torture. I watch it fail and go back and fail again and feel something I don't want to look at straight on. At half nine at night they have me up on the flat asphalt roof to hang a heavy linen cloth over the veranda’s arched window, the one she built with her own hands, to keep the coming heat off the house. I get it half up and stop. The sky has gone nipple pink and skimmed milk blue and I stand on the warm tar with the cloth in my hands and let the work wait. No one to show it to. At night, once his mother has gone to sleep, we watch Modern Love on the couch. I light every candle I can find. I feel somewhat better. He leans his hand on my leg. I never want to leave this place, but I do. I always do. I need the city, and I hope it needs me just as much.

Tuesday

Bartarted. When I am alone, hot roommate at the gym and his mother at work, I take all my clothes off and walk through the house naked. I do it in the flat too. I cannot stand fabric on my skin at home. I spend the afternoon going through the house. I have known it ten years. I am looking for photos of hot roommate as a teenager, us at festivals, the little gifts I gave him, our old schoolwork from art school. I don’t find any of it. What I find instead is his mother’s love letters, written in French. I can hardly read them and I would rather not say what I did read. I knew I shouldn’t and it was stronger than me. Bad, bad girl. The sky today looks like the sky on a melancholic day in August 2018. Freshly graduated from high school, the first time Beau broke up with me. Everyone knew each other, one big scene of twenty or thirty people in their own little cliques, jumping clique to clique to fuck each other and break each other’s hearts. Kinda like Sodom, but not really. We all met at the same spot before going out, and I was so scared to see him there, and so eager, both at once. I don’t know about Beau. I don’t want to leave here. The city is waiting at the end of this. I am a broke writer so I get my knowledge through piracy, illegal books downloaded onto my Kobo. The Pillow Book, After Claude, Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, Sartre. I read ravenously and keep opening the same drafts of my own and closing them again. I am giving my own projects abandonment issues the way my parents gave me mine. The thoughts come up vague and go back under before I can hold them. I forget them the second they form. Nothing stays long enough to get written down. I eat my pain au chocolat like every girl in the city, eating through the tears, the palate catching the salt and the chocolate at the same time. My nose hurts.

I go through my old Facebook messages with an ex-fling from when I took a break from the scene in 2020. I was so depressed then I couldn’t even come up with a decent excuse for cancelling on him while he sat there waiting for me to show up. He told my ex best friend at a rave that I broke his heart, and she told me. Nico says I can still apologise if I feel bad about it, and I do, I want him to know I’m sorry, but something tells me I shouldn’t. It would be weird. Nico says it wouldn’t be weird at all. He just doesn’t get it. Being nice makes people think I’m weird. I turn the faucet on and sit naked on the edge of the tub until it fills. I get in and close my eyes and the lukewarm water feels like a vacation, a swimming pool somewhere. I think about him. I think about how much I miss sex, how long I have been holding it in, for reasons I don’t dare put down here. I take the shower head, put it on jet, hang one leg over the side and hold it to the right side of my clitoris. This jet satisfies me in ways the one back at the flat only wishes it could. I make myself come an unhealthy number of times. I try not to moan and bite my hand instead. The number of orgasms is turning into some masochistic thing I don’t have a name for. I always go this far and I don’t know why. One is never enough. I dry off still half-orgasming, and when I stand a little water runs back out of me, from the jet.

On the table in the veranda there is a vase of lavender gone wilted. I spend at least half an hour at it, delicate, taking the dried buds off the stems one by one and dropping them into a sachet. For emotional healing and realigning my chakras, and mostly because it smells good. I go up the stairs and enter my room, I set the sachet next to my pillow. The whole room smells like lavender. I take the bathrobe off, light the candles, get under the duvet and look out the window and breathe with the sound of the wind turbines, big and almost almighty.

Wednesday

I go out to clip roses and lavender and get pierced by so many thorns I had forgotten roses had. Next door the neighbours, proud of the Confederate flag they fly even though they are not American, are playing Rhythm of the Night. Ironic. Every day but on the weekends for a few weeks now, a number I don’t recognise calls me. Several times a day. They never leave a voicemail. So I never pick up. I am sick all afternoon, alone in my room. Hot roommate goes to the store with his mother and comes back quiet and gloomy. He comes up, opens the door and sits on the corner of the bed.

Is something wrong? he says.