5
That's all it’d taken to leave me vomiting hours later.
Trembling on my bedroom floor until my joints ached.
John rang to check in, informing me I’d been paler than he'd ever seen when we parted. ‘Mm-hm’ was my universal reply to everything—more an acknowledgement that I’d heard than an attempt to respond.
For now, coherent sentences escaped me. To say I was drained would be inadequate. More like enervated. Cattle-prodded.
Still, I rejected the warmth of my bed a while longer.
This was penance for being so pathetic. When the floor began to swerve, I shut my eyes.
They were bloodshot from having watched the clock above the fireplace for hours; the numbers quivering whenever I teared up.
It was four a.m.—fast approaching five. Now I crawled to the balcony door and inched it open.
Studied the terrace like it didn't belong there.
Absorbed the early morning hush. The dew settling in like gossamer pearls upon the world.
Cigarettes. Couldn’t get them out of my head.
I craved a nicotine hit like I craved him, sad to say.
They were his anyway. One tucked behind the fine curves of his ear.
Or dangling from the pillowy lips as he texted.
One half-crushed in a stolen hotel ashtray.
Dozens of filters along the molding of the balcony at his London home.
Dozens collecting in the dirt of the patio plants until the gardener found them and became irate.
A new box tapped compulsively against his palm, as he imagined it did something to pack the tobacco more soundly.
The days I’d spent longing to be a flimsy cylinder chock-full of a poisoned plant.
For him to inhale me, granting free reign of his insides.
Trusting me to deliver that tonic jolt and dispel his anxieties.
I wanted him to look to me for the unsolvable.
To be that which he depended on hourly, deluded that I did anything to rid him of his vexations.
That his fingers should itch to hold me.
For him to remain addicted no matter how lethal or demanding I became.
Had someone asked me to describe him in a single word, I would simply say: cigarettes.
Witty, moody, laconic, beautiful—unearthly beautiful—these were all close seconds.
The smell of smoke had become inextricably linked to the memories I housed of him.
So too had the striking of a lighter become synonymous with the sound of his laughter.
The flicker of a flame—the sheen of his lips, the flash of a wry smile.
By the time the smoke had reached me, even that of a stranger's cigarette, I felt him close by, as if he was reading over my shoulder, or falling asleep on my back as we stood in the shower.
After parting in the parking lot, I’d rushed home to listen to his debut single on repeat, each time disinterring a bit more of us than before.
Mesmerized by the candor of his vocals—of his carefully selected words.
To hear him croon about us was unnervingly intimate.
Confrontational, even. It ignited little fires all over my flesh.
How had I missed it was describing our past?
Had I deluded myself so much during our separation, to think he could simply forget me?
Forget what we’d had? Deluded myself into thinking anything he had with her came close to what he’d had with me?
Impossible. Despite my spiraling, I knew what we’d shared was inimitable.
Of course he was writing about me. It was an ode to our virulence.
An elegy of queer love—indignant and cutting.
There was nothing conventionally romantic about it.
What we had transcended human connection.
This thing tainted every other relationship we attempted to foster.
Pity for her, as she could not draw out of him what I had.
Things we’d mothered in one another and safeguarded from the caprice of the world.
Things he’d written about with such reverence, no matter their indecency.
I touched my lips, remembering the ghost of his final kiss.
Seemed like a lifetime ago, yet his ardor was anything but remote.
In bed, he could be both dream and nightmare, as the song conveyed.
Could literally fuck all night, to the detriment of us both.
Sometimes, the only relief to be had was to slip away and sleep in the bathtub behind locked doors.
Keeping him and his volcanic libido at bay.
Yet in the end, my Stockholm Syndrome kept me crawling back, seeking to appease him in any way I could.
The lyrics confessed he had relished this.
I shuddered now, remembering him as my captor and not my lover—all with a profane fondness.
After the gala, and after the vomiting had finally stopped, I pressed a damp towel to my face and recalled the moments before I became sick.
I wasn't drunk, I was sick. ‘Gotta get better...gotta get better...gotta get better...’ I repeated the delirious refrain in my head, as if to will myself into recovery.
And I can't quite explain how I felt, only to say that it wasn't right.
Half the lights over the mirror were out and my complexion looked grey. Almost cadaverous.
Later I lay in bed uncovered and sweated from every pore in my body, even between my toes.
Reuniting with him under the pretense of old mates had been startling.
As jarring as when I’d brushed my fingers against an exposed wall socket back home.
Bone-deep it shook me—to the roots of my teeth.
Now everything I’d suppressed the past two years pulsated from within like currents, rebounding against the walls.
***
Joni Mitchell's "Case of You" was playing from the Bluetooth speaker when I awoke later that day.
I had thirty missed calls and nearly as many voicemails and texts.
I listened to each with a numbness that overhauled my ability to comprehend.
I gave up trying to respond to everyone halfway through. My hunger was debilitating.
Moving downstairs to forage the fridge, I ran into the cleaning lady and listened to my mum laugh through a story she’d called to tell me over voicemail. She was perpetually in a good mood. ‘Love youuu,’ she always sang at the end of her recordings.
As I rounded the kitchen, the vacuum cleaner worked my nerves, grinding and droning for what seemed forever.
I wished I’d stayed in bed until they were gone.
Grimacing at Anna and her sister from behind the fridge door, it took all I was not to order them to leave. After all, I had paid them to be here.
The clock read some time after 1pm. Great, I’d officially fucked my morning and the countless meetings John had lined up. I wouldn’t hear the end of it now. I looked around and felt out of place in my own kitchen.
My days since the band were unnervingly quiet. So much so that I sent myself an email every night with a to-do list for the following day, just to maintain some semblance of purpose. Although, the effort mostly only managed to make me feel more aimless.
This house was large, echoey, and lonesome.
I ought to welcome the vacuum. At least it signified another human presence.
Realistically, I couldn't have expected more of a place this expansive with zero roommates and few invited guests. I was a bit tamer than most people my generation, having aged a decade in the years we’d toured.
That would account for my habits of reclusion.
I could no longer tolerate offstage noise.
Cereal was the order of the day. There were loads of options thanks to Emily; assistant of the year.
She doted on me nearly as much as my mum and had furnished the place with snacks and food when I first got the keys.
Only after I moved in did I notice something forlorn about the place, and by then it was too late to change my mind.
For the time being, this house refused to be warmed.
I reached to put the box away in the cupboard and dropped a plate that shattered near my foot. Brushing fine shards from atop my toes, I stepped around the rest on my way to the stove. I ate standing over it, since the island was full of paperwork and an open laptop.
Within minutes of the plate shattering, Anna's sister Reina came scurrying over to attack it with a handheld vacuum. Both women were my elders by many years and strictly professional. They were also Czechs and totally unimpressed by my career; often snubbing my attempts to converse.
"Hey there!" I sang. "Reina, right?" I gave her a double thumbs up. She eyed me over the top of her wire-frame glasses, offering a tight-lipped nod. Clearly, she was pissed about the plate.
"M’sorry..." I pouted. "Forgive me? Pleasssse?" I gave her another double thumbs-up and an enthusiastic grin, hoping the doey blue eyes would work their magic. She nodded and muttered something about me being more careful the next time.
Halfway up the steps on my retreat from enemy territory, my phone rang.
It was Emily. She rattled off my schedule for the remainder of the day and chided me for sleeping in without warning her.
Half the appointments I missed were already rescheduled, and she urged me to keep the more dire ones for late afternoon.
I found out we couldn't reschedule the doctor's again without paying, since I hadn't canceled within the allotted 24-hour window. She told me to just pay the fee and call it a day when I started in on how all LA doctors were dicks. Before hanging up, she remembered one last note. There’d been an email this morning from Roman's manager.
He wanted to know if he could get in touch.