Page 91 of False Start

I wish I could believe her.

“You sure this isn’t just your next hobby?” The wounded look on her face makes me almost regret what I’ve said, but I need to know.

We need to do this.All of it.

She shakes my shoulder like she’s trying to knock some sense into me. “Just the same way that I’m sure you aren’t meant to be an addict. You’re lost. We all get a little lost in the dark, Antônia. Even me.”

“Even you?” I laugh a little in disbelief.

She’s the perfect picture of composed, organized, kept together. She’s everything I could never be, and that’s when I remember who her brother is, what growing up with that might do to someone. But maybe we’re more alike than I realized, it makes sense. Everything that she does is a coping mechanism.

Overcompensating to prevent the past from repeating.

“You will never get past this, not until you let yourself grieve for Lonnie.” Each word hits like a six-foot blocker and leaves a sweltering bruise.

She’s right. We wear the same cuts, but a wound never heals the same twice.

I’m just not sure I’m ready to feel the full impact of that pain.

No choice.

I’ll be feeling everything in:

three

two

one.

The rushof nausea comes so fast, I’m borderline violent pushing her off me. With a higher power on my side, I make it to the bathroom, the shirt stuck to my back from sweat and saliva pooling at my mouth as I hold back the next wave. Nothing but bile comes out. I’m scrambling, grabbing at every piece of fabric glued to me. Pulling the shirt over my head, I toss it behind me, ripping the sleeve when it snags on the sharp, exposed pieces of my broken cast. I’m shuffling my socks off and trying the same with the pants, so uncomfortable inside my own skin that all I can do is take things off, take things off until all that’s left is me.

But I can’t takemeoff me, and it’s goddamn agony to be trapped in this body.

I lay on my side, pulling my knees into my chest, the cool bathroom tile somehow soothing just enough for me to close my eyes, but there’s no urge to sleep. I shake—not from cold, not from hunger, not from fear. I just shake.

Because it’s all my body can do.

Naked.

On the floor.

Of her bathroom.

The remainder of my dignity down the toilet.

A sliver of hope somehow still remains in the shape of a tiny bag of powder I’ve hidden in a jeans pocket.

That feeling turns into self-loathing, and I despise myself for knowing that Iwilluse it. It doesn’t matter what she does. I’ve never gone this far, never walked so far intothe tunnel, and now, it’s too dark for me to see how long of a walk back it is to get out. There is no light on the other side.

I keep walking toward the luring abyss anyway.

My muscles clench and release painfully as I crunch into a smaller ball.

I try to disappear.

I want my fucking mom.

The thought is worse than a pill, worse than the powder, and twice as lethal as both combined. Calling her at my lowest only proves everything she’s been saying all along.