Cocaine & Cab Rides

He comes to me like a gift-wrapped bomb, ticking away the remaining moments of my life. When my mind wanders and I have allowed myself to be happy for a moment, the memory of him explodes in my brain and leaves me shaking. He comes like a nuclear holocaust eating me from the inside out, melting my insides into swirling plasma. He eats me and melts me, just like the old days.
Seconds ago, I was contentedly sloshing Pine Sol across the cold tile and singing “Alouette” for the mice hiding under the kitchen sink. Now the lyrics are traffic jamming in my throat and it hurts. I am the skylark having her feathers plucked. My hand shakes as I raiseit to my mouth to take a long pull from my cigarette. My freshly renovated downtown apartment feels empty and cold. The voices drifting up from the bar district below are reminders of how alone I am tonight. It happens this way every so often. This is my private undoing that will not be reflected on a social networking site. It will not be the topic of conversation with my friends at Happy Hour. Later, in public, this sadness will not cross my face; I will not share it with strangers. I will carry these memories close to my chest with my hands cupped gently around them – the way a child holds a firefly.
There is no reason to fight this flood once the levees break. My bottom sinks deep into the couch. My body is heavy against the blue microsuede and I let it hold me. The rounded whirring of the dryer sets pace with my spinning head, and I sink deep into agitated melancholy. The smell of Pine Sol becomes the smell of beer and smoke and I am there again, the night we met.
I am twenty-three, tan, and tone. My face and tits are filling back out nicely after a particularly bad bender had left me sunken and strung out. Money has been good lately and my clothes are new. It is summer in a college town and everyone is young and understimulated. We are all looking for trouble. In the back room of a too familiar bar I sit talking with familiar faces saying familiar things. When he walks in, my attention is seized by blonde hair and blue eyes and the breadth of his shoulders. Every other female in the room is now a liability. After ten minutes and a few brazen stare downs he comes to me and says, “I’m bored.”
“I can fix that,” I smile and he is mine and he knows it. He smiles back.
“You party?”
Two phone calls later, we’re in the land of brass poles, mirror-paneled walls, and slick black runways. I am home. Reigna is dancing on the round main stage so I lead him across the floor and grab a seat while she removes a sheer cover-up. When her set is through, she makes her way over for small talk and fast business. I buy $150 of fun and we’re off to his place, seven blocks east and twelve south. We are a flurry of getting to know. We talk, we kiss, we grind. I am thrown on his bed and we only get up to do another line. We talk and we talk and we share things that two strangers never discuss. We are three hours into a five-year life affair and our hearts have already galloped off into a clichéd sunset. The rest of me gallops off at sunrise leaving a layer of white dust on his bed side table and my perfume in his sheets.
Fast forward through fifty months. Fast forward through the first drunken proposal. “I want to be with you, be with you.” Fast forward through vacations and graduation and his first restaurant opening. Fast forward through moving in, moving out, and moving back in. “You can always come back home.” Fast forward through red wine, carpet picnics and living room wrestling. Fast forward through doors slamming, dishes breaking and strange names in his phone. Fast forward through orgasms and punches. Fast forward through motorcycle rides in the summer, Christmas trees in the winter and everything in between. Fast forward through a baby that never will be. “It’s whatever you want to do, honey.” Fast forward through my relapse. Please, somebody, fast forward.
There is no love like the love between drug addicts. It is a passionate, desperate, beautifully and embarrassingly vulnerable existence. It is neither for the weak nor the strong. It is for the damaged, the bruised peaches of the world. The thirst for the drug will bring two people together and rip them apart with a sense of tragedy usually reserved for the ancient Greeks. There were clubs and music and friends dancing. There were hours of drug-addled promises and secrets that were lost each time the sun rose, and the drugs ran out, and the demons came. There were unpaid bills unwashed hair and bloody noses.
I am twenty-seven. My eyes are blinking against too white light streaming in through the ice frosted window. I ache. My lips are dry, and when I lick them, they are rough and taste like a dirty dime. It is cold and I am naked, but he is there next to me and he puts his arm around me and pulls my backside to him. He is inside me now. I let the tears stream and they shake and fall abruptly from my face to the pillow each time he thrusts. If he knows I am crying, he doesn’t show it. I let myself be had as I come slowly out of sleep. I languish in him and let his movement comfort me and we don’t speak at all.
When he is through, I go to the bathroom and survey myself in the mirror. I am bruised and scraped and cut. Blood and eyeliner are streaked across a swollen face that looks like someone I used to know. I am glad that the mirror stops under my chin. I stand trying desperately to rewind. To last night? No dice. What day is it? Sunday. Yesterday was… and I am knocked over as Saturday comes barreling back.
We are upstairs at the house on 35th. It is Saturday in January but sunny outside. The vacant house is chilly but the staging furniture makes everything appear warm and lived in. The realtor has just walked down stairs and I grab his wrist and pull him back into what I hope will soon be my bedroom, our bedroom. I imagine new seeds being planted and, this time, allowing them to grow.
“What do you think?”
He shrugs.
“I’m asking you if you think you could build a life here.” I hear pleading in my voice and am angered by it.
“Don’t do it for me. This is yours.” He won’t even look at me. My eyes wander to his phone in his hand and I am wondering if he is waiting to hear from someone.
“You’re such a prick.” I head down the stairs and out the door. The realtor looks startled as I blow past her. She can go to hell too.
Now I am driving wildly and calling and calling. When he finally answers I unleash, recounting all of his failures as a man in painstaking detail and biting accuracy. I am saying horrible things and realizing that I mean them. I am telling him that it’s over and realizing that it has been for a while. The whole house buying thing is revealing itself as a last ditch effort at saving a terminal love. I call my realtor and then my friends. My realtor is disappointed; my friends are over it. Each, in turn, waits for me to agree to meet them and then rushes me off the phone. I don’t blame them. It is difficult and tedious to watch someone you care for repeatedly self-destruct. We make plans to go downtown and celebrate love with a wink and a nudge. One of our guy friends is proposing to his girlfriend tonight and we’re all supposed to be at the bar when it happens. To do what, I’m not exactly sure of. This day has been a shit show and I can’t be alone tonight waiting for a call that won’t come. Inebriation is the only cure for this kind of travesty and I will take my medicine like a good girl.

I am upstairs in another familiar bar with more familiar faces. My friend proposes to his girlfriend, kneeling in the middle of the dance floor and I turn away in disgust. There are shots and more shots, and I am making inappropriate suggestions to boys I have known since high school. I see in their faces that I have gone from desirable to amusing. Screw them, I have a tab and never needed a drinking partner before. So on with the shots. I am stumbling into the bathroom and I barely make it. Getting my pants zipped and my hands washed is hard but I manage. I start down the steps to take a drag of dirty air out by the street. There is a dizzying whirl and now I am falling in to the thick blackness of my own drunk. I have to get home. I sense that I am very far away but there is a nice boy leading me toward a purple car. I smile as he waves goodbye, resuming his position by the door. I see that his shirt says “SECURITY” and I think to myself, “What a nice guy. That’s what I need.” My eyes rest for a moment. When my heavy head lifts, there is only red digital numbers and the back of a man’s head. I am in a cab and my pitiful stomach has had enough of tonight. Vomit soaks into my designer jeans and I begin to cry, but I’m not quite sure why. Still I bawl. A moment later, I am pulled from the cab by a disembodied hand. Someone is yelling; at who though and why so loud? This is all too much too fast and I don’t know who we’re yelling at and I have to get home. I have to get back in that cab, but someone is blocking me. I have to get home. I lunge for the cab door diving past the outline of my obstacle. I have to get home. I am pulled back again by my shirt and the sound of it ripping upsets me and I am begging to be taken home. If I get there I can call him and I can fix everything and the house is still for sale and I didn’t really mean those things I said. So I scream and I beg and I claw and then there is a fist. The neat balled up hand is no longer disembodied. It belongs to an angry cab driver and it is striking a girl who left her credit card at the bar and her lunch in the floorboard of his livelihood. I am thrown, hard across the Baltimore sidewalk leaving skin and lip-gloss behind. There is blonde hair tangled in a gold Persian pinky ring making its way across the city to a carwash. I blink hard and I am back in the bathroom. There’s that familiar stranger again. I take a breath and prepare myself for what is coming.
When I walk back into the bedroom, he is dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t look at me as he says, “The pigs found you on Fayette, in a ditch.” My mother’s worst nightmare has just been verbalized. “I was the last number in your phone.” Damn drunk dialing. “They called me.” I cast my eyes down and they catch on the rolled up twenty-dollar bill and credit card on the dresser. “I’ve never seen someone that drunk. I was worried you would die in your sleep. I stayed up watching you all night.” I gesture toward the dresser, “I bet that wasn’t too hard.” He says nothing. Five years of familiar are gone. They galloped off into oblivion and now he is following it, leaving behind a layer of white dust and a bruised peach -- naked, bloody, and blue.
The angry buzz of the dryer rouses me and the Pine Sol is still on the floor. I wipe my face and it is healed and smooth. I whisper a prayer of thanks and pick up the mop.