Disclaimer: I do not, under any circumstance, weather condition, legal contract bindings, social standind, political aspects, etc... own South Of Nowhere. If I did, well, things would be different. Like... it would be.. .awesomer... and stuff... thats not necessarily appropriate.
A/N: Hi there! You might remember me from such stories as "Possibilities" and "How to kill your Boss". You might be wondering why I'm posting this story instead of the other one. Frankly (not you Franky, love) I just got bored of it, and I wasn't really feeling it anymore (I did finish it for a friend, so if anyones interested, I;ll send it to you or just post the rest). So I wrote this one.
A thin trail of smoke rose toward the the ceiling, twisting and twirling and tying itself into tiny, serpentine knots, stretching it's fluid form across the yellowing ceiling. It rested up there with the rest of the thickening smoke, sickly sweet and cloying. I inhaled, stretching my own body languorously across my bed, enjoying the slight burn as my limbs stretched from hours of lying still. The spliff, which had been resting loosely between two of my fingers, slipped to the hardwood flooring, landing with a slight noise.
I looked at my tan fingers, flexing them, extending the fingers open, and clenching them shut. The tendons in my wrist danced in the dim light from the candles around my room. I flipped my hand over and wiggled my fingers, the thin delicate bones rising and falling, like the thin keys of a skeleton's organ, playing the final song he heard before his death.
I could hear that song playing now, in the back of my head, flowing smoothly, oiled by the toxins of the cannabis in my system. Slow and melancholy, the music plays, the shadows flickering on the walls in time to the music. A simple slow waltz. One two three, one two three. I close my eyes and breathe in time, one two three, one two three.
Three counts. Three seconds. Three seconds that could turn into three minutes. To some, I suppose three minutes is a short amount of time. In reality, a lot can happen in three minutes. A love song on average takes about three minutes to complete. A swimmer doing laps at school would be happy if the could do the 200 meter in 3 minutes. Underwater, three minutes can be excruciatingly long. It can take three minutes to die.
I sat up and looked at the floor, at the spliff on the ground. It smouldered quietly, resting in a pile of old ashes, still mostly whole. I reached down and picked it up, setting it back in between my lips. Pot wouldn't kill me, but it can numb the pain. Pain of everyone else leaving. Pain of still being here while they are gone. Pain of just being me. Why of being me? When you've experienced what I have, it's not hard to believe that your always in pain. Just being is painful. To walk around and look at all the people you've known for ages, and know that you can't look at them the same way. It hurts. But in a strange way, that pain is comforting.
It will always be there, no matter how much drugs you use, how much alcohol you poison yourself with. Physical pain you inflict yourself to forget the mental pain, mental pain brought on from photographs to drown out the physical. It's constant, and it's far better than felling nothing at all.
I lean back onto the bed and take a deep inhale of the sweet drug. For now, my pain is just a simple, pleasurable hum, a backdrop to the ghostly symphony in my mind. A metronome in the backbeat of my life.
The door of my room opened, and Kyla peeked in, shaking her head and stepping all the way in when she found me alone. She closed it and flicked the light switch on, illuminating the room with the single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She turned to look at me, laid out on the bare matress.
"Why aren't you answering my calls?" She said, crossing her arms as if she was annoyed, but her face betrayed the worry.
I shrugged and took another hit from the paper roll between my fingers, tapping the ask off the end ont the floor. "They turned the phone off last week, and I forgot to pay AT&T. I didn't know that you called."
Kyla pushed my legs to the side and gingerly sat down on the bed, springs groaning in protest at the added weight. She smoothed the wrinkles out of her expensive looking work suit and frowned at me. With a quick movement, she snatched the spliff from between my fingers and stamped it out with a heel. "Did you at least go to work this week, Ash?" she asked.
"Nope. Kendra was there." I said, sitting up and running a hand through my curly hair. It was slightly oily, and I wiped my hand on the mattress. "I can't focus when she's there. I keep feeling like I should say something." I turned to her, and she looked sadly back at me.
"It's not your fault Ari died, and Kendra knows it too. You got to got to work, or the landlords going to kick you out." She set a manicured hand on my shoulder, frowning slightly when I pulled away.
I backed up into the corner of the bed and curled my knees to my chest. "I don't want to go back to the pizza place. I just can't Ky, not when Ari isn't there, and Kendra's practically blaming me for her sisters death." I felt a tear make its way out of the corner of my eye, and I saw Kyla shake her head.
"Get a new job. I'm going to be miserable if I have to house your ass again this year. It'll interfere with my working schedule and I've got this huge project at the studio..." She started to gesture wildly as she got excited, so I kicked her sharply in the leg to cut her off.
"It's okay. I'll go look tomorrow or something. Not like I have any kind of a social life anyway." I reached over to grab another spliff off the night stand and flicked the lighter to life. I lit it quickly and blew a stream of smoke in her direction. "I got this. I don't need you anyway." I leaned against the headboard and looked toward the dresser, laden with half-spent candles.
She stood up and moved toward the door. "Maybe if you weren't so busy getting stoned, Ashley, you could get a gig singing at the bar down the street." She reached into her purse and pulled out a wad of cash and threw it onto the mattress next to me.
"Go pay your bills and actually eat something healthy, instead of buying drugs." I ignored it, choosing to stare silently at her. She sniffed at me in disgust. "And take a shower, would you? And maybe tidy this place up a bit."
She opened the door and exited, leaving me in the bright room alone to myself.
I sat like that for a second, occasionally taking a drag from the spliff, before standing up to stand by the window. With a finger, I separated the curtains and looked out onto the late afternoon L.A street below. All those people, busy with their daily business, each wishing they could just go home, with a loved one or by themselves, and get away from all the people on the street. All of them, except...
A blonde head walked past across the street, towards the bar. Her head was down, face partially covered by her hair, but it looked like... it looked like Ari. She continued toward the bar, putting her hood up over her face and looking back as if to make sure she wasn't being followed. For a brief moment, I saw her whole face. I was slightly disappointed to see that it wasn't the girl that I once loved, but she was so strikingly similar to her, it was eerie. And intriguing.
As quickly as I saw her, she vanished into the bar. I back away from the window, feeling slightly haunted from nearly seeing my dead fiancé alive and well. While it wasn't Ari, it was someone else, and I was curious about this girl, who, in that brief moment, looked just as haunted as me, just as afraid, and just as anxious to get away from it all as I was.
A/N: its a bit short, but thats because its an intro. But I will start posting more often. Hopefully. I have a pretty big project-o I'm working on. But your reviews are like sweet, sweet, life giving nectar that feeds the writer within me, and urges me to writer faster and faster until my keyboard bursts into flames. They send a warm, tingling feeling at the pit of my stomach. It feeds the hunger of my self-conscious being! It is the cheese to my burrito, the the triple word square to my 100 pt word on Words With Friends. It's Tapioca pudding under a dying palm tree. So please, be the ramen to my orange soda and review?