No energy for this. Plus it was getting later. Time was just slipping by like something. Damn it. Can't describe it, this sensation that time is flying. I typed and typed away, doing article after article, trying to forget myself.
Jesse would walk by, tall and good looking and so self assured. Would I ever feel that self assured? Sure, I faked it all the time. I was smart, I was in college and writing at this paper and doing okay. But sometimes on the inside I felt lost or broken or damaged. I wanted to grab the nice razor blade and really feel the pain instead of this insulated numbness. But no. I wouldn't do that. I was better now. Years of group had taught me coping skills. I'd snap that rubber band for all it was worth.
I guess I felt some sort of comfort in the glow of my computer screen, or maybe it felt like escape. It was where I wanted to stay, curled up in its light, not thinking, not feeling anything.
"Hey, frosh," Jesse said on his millionth trip by my desk. He kissed my forehead and I smiled my tired grateful little smile at him.
"Almost done?" he said with that slight raising of his eyebrows.
"Yeah. I'm almost done," Another tired smile and he went on his way. He wanted to go and get a drink at the trendy place and so did I. I thought I had been trying to be careful with alcohol since it never did my mother any good. Maybe I was starting to see her point when I drank. It was nice and warm and made the pain sort of blur. Made the horrible things seem not so bad or at least like they didn't matter so much.
I finished up my sentence and saved the damn thing, shut everything down and looked around the darkened room for Jesse. We slung jackets over our shoulders and took off, and I was already thinking of that first long swallow of the whisky I would order. That whisky would make the pain ebb, would make what Jesse would say to me seem more interesting, would make it matter less that he wasn't Craig.
Oh I had been so good about Craig. Seen through his lies at last, his desperate bright eyed cocaine lies and his kisses like Judas and he never loved me, not like I loved him. I finally saw it for what it was, saw that he used people to get what he wanted or what he needed, saw that Craig was damaged beyond my ability to help.
Jesse saw it, too. Sure it was easy to see when you were on the outside, he said Craig crapped all over me and I went back for more. I had confused my friendship with him for love, maybe. Or I wanted it to be more, wanted something Craig didn't and he just used that at the end.
The trendy place beckoned with its neon lights and humid atmosphere and we went in like being enveloped, wrapped up tight in oblivion.
"What will you have, Ellie?" My name was jarring when he said it, more personal somehow. It almost made me cringe when he said Ellie. Craig used to call me Elle.
"Whiskey," I said, and shades of my mother came back to haunt me. I shouldn't drink, I knew that, and felt the guilt begin to creep up my nerve endings, through my capillaries and into my brain. But I couldn't help it, I was in too much pain. Maybe it was better than slitting an artery, maybe it was better than shooting heroin, happiness was a warm gun after all.
It arrived, sweet dark amber drink with its depths, its swirling and muted colors, beautiful. I closed my eyes and sipped, lovely little sips and felt tension start to slide away. Why couldn't I be happy with Jesse? He was attractive, smart, caring, ect, ect. Why couldn't that be good enough for me?
One little glass of whiskey became another and conversations ran into each other like water, flowing here and there with little to obstruct them and I was careful not to mention Craig, not to let Jesse know or see how much it bothered me.
The night hung now on that triangle point where one more sip would cause nausea and vomiting and the spinning world, the whole world to tip off its axis and spin out of control.
"Let's go," I heard myself say from a million miles away and Jesse nodded somewhere below me and I realized with an unhappy start that I was a sip too late, and the whole evening's ingesting came up in one glut, and it splattered on the side of the road in all its sick rainbow hues.
Put to bed somehow, didn't even recall how, but I woke up with a skull buster and groaned. 'This is what you deserve,' the quiet sinister voice spoke up, and I had to agree. The sun came in full force and I thought it might destroy me, like I might be a corpse unable to handle direct sunlight. My skin cracking, hair turning to dust.
"Late night?" Marco said, bearing a steaming cup of coffee. Sweet sweet boy and there were echoes of that other morning, Craig coming down off his high, his nose running, dressed only in a pair of jeans. I had the coffee then, I was the together girl on that side of things. Craig looked younger somehow partially undressed, and long as I've known him we had never slept in the same house, I'd never seen him when he first woke up, his hair all messy and curly.
"Thanks," I said, sounding slow and sick, sounding like my mother, and the layers of self loathing were impossible to calculate at that point. I took the cup from him and sipped, my stomach cramping as I dared to put more liquids into it.
Sitting by the window, unbothered by the sun, sipping another cup of coffee, the boys all gone. The heart wants what it wants. I was tired of always denying myself things that I wanted, things that I needed. I was tired of always being last on my list of priorities. I wanted to see Craig. I needed to see him. So I was going to.
Hop a plane, find this place Joey stuck him in. Surely they had visiting hours. He was sick again. I'd sort of missed the bi-polar thing, that was Ashley's and she let him down. Now she was in love with Jimmy as though Craig had never invaded her life.
I hated flying, hated the trapped pent up feeling of being in that smooth capsule of the plane, moving so fast that it didn't feel like moving at all. Off the plane I rented a car and drove to Joey's new place, the car having that simonized ultra clean smell, three tree shaped air fresheners hanging off the rear view mirror.
"Ellie," Joey said with his mouth in a little O of surprise.
"Hi, Joey. I'd like to visit Craig," Dispense with bullshit. Down to business. I wanted to see Craig.
Joey took me there, and we were mostly silent as he drove along straight expanses of highway. He'd grown a goatee again. I noticed gray in it. I'd noticed a few grays in my own hair, wiry silvery little things, old before their time.
"I've got some errands to do. Besides I figure you might want to visit him alone," he said, and I nodded, and silently thanked him for that. I went across the sunny parking lot, my shoes clicking loud on the asphalt. There was nothing out hear to muffle the sound. Everything was raw, trees upended by the roots. Inside the building the lobby was cool, the stone floor slippery, my shoes making a different sort of sound on that floor.
I asked the smooth faced receptionist about visiting him, my voice sounding nervous and cracking. I was nervous, I felt electricity in my blood stream knowing he was here in this building somewhere. I had to wait while someone went to see if he wanted to see me, and the waiting was a funny sort of time, incriminations crept in. 'What are you doing here?' 'You think this is a good idea?' Cryptic questions without answers.
"Ellie Nash?" a staff person said to me from a crack in a door beyond the secretary. I nodded and stood up.
"He'll see you. Come with me," she said, and I followed her obediently through that door and down a hall to a door she unlocked with a key. I don't know what I was expecting but it was just a hallway and a dining room off of that.
"He's in there," she said, and left me. I wondered into the room, seeing a lot of people older and more haggard looking than Craig, though quite a few of the women had eyes that reminded me of my mother. And then I saw him, wearing clothes I had never seen before, a shirt with a collar instead of his usual rock tee shirts, faded blue jeans.
"Craig?" He looked up and smiled, that smile that has already broken my heart.
"Hi, Ellie,"
I stood there not knowing what to do, not really knowing why I came here. Was it because I loved him? But he has made it clear, time and time again, that he doesn't love me.
"Let's go to my room," he said, and walked out of that room, past the nurse's desk and down another hall. I followed him, my mouth dry, my headache starting to come back pulse by pulse. Oh what was I doing here?
In his room, just a bed and a single bureau, he shut the door and sat on the bed. I sat in a chair.
"I didn't think you'd come," he said slowly, "I didn't think you wanted to see me anymore,"
Seeing him was overwhelming. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to see him anymore. I wanted to be done with him, wash my hands of him and his problems and his games. What was it that kept pulling me back? He was better for my numbness than any razor. I thought that might be the real reason. When I was around Craig I could feel things.
"I know, well, I wanted to see you," I looked at him, he was thinner than he was before he left for Vancouver, his clothes hung a bit. And he looked so much older. In high school he'd been kind of baby faced cute but that was gone. He was all sharp angles and five o'clock stubble, and there had been pain in his eyes before but it was different now.
"I wanted to…" I started but choked up, started to cry with all that was overwhelming me. I wanted him to love me like I loved him and wasn't it convenient for me to visit him while he was trapped in this place? I shouldn't have come, I shouldn't have come, that thought repeated itself in a mantra in my head.
"Ellie, come here," he said, and opened his arms to me and I went into them gratefully, hung onto his thin shoulders, felt the beating of his heart. I was where I wanted to be because I was a selfish girl. I didn't care that he didn't love me, that he shouldn't be comforting me when he was dealing with this drug addiction and all the other things, his past and the bi-polar that colored all of his presents. I'd always asked of him, and everyone else, far more than they could give.
"Ellie, what's wrong?" His voice so soft, so nice and caring, hearing him talk to me like that made me cry harder and cling to him harder and I felt so out of balance. Like I was where I should be and where I shouldn't be at the exact same time.
"Shhhh, it's okay, Ellie, honey…shhhh,"
I looked up at him, the tears still streaming, I was still in his arms. He leaned down then and kissed me, this time not in a cocaine haze but for real, his kiss slow and gentle and I closed my eyes. I felt that things were in balance for the first time in my life.