ihavebeenfloated

It’s four in the morning and I’m in my car. I haven’t slept. I’m feeling vulnerable and empty inside. My teeth are vibrating and nothing seems quite right. But, that’s alright with me. I’m not sure what I’m doing. I’m smoking cigarettes and listening to music. I guess I know what I’m doing but I’m not sure why.

There’s a girl standing on the side of the street, one foot on the curb and one foot on the street, trying not to fall into the bushes lining the train tracks. There’s not a single car on the road aside from my own, and she’s hitchhiking. At four in the morning, she’s got her thumb out like she’s seen in so many movies that start off exciting and end bloody. That’s alright with her, and that’s alright with me.

I stop, pop open my door, and she takes a good long look at me. I look at her without smiling, and I like to think that is enough to earn trust. She tells me her name, which I quickly forget. She tells me she’s heading to wherever that isn’t exactly here, and I say that’s alright. She gets in, closes the door, and the light in my car fades back out.

I drive, and she talks about nothing. She produces a small bag of meth out of the crotch of her pants. She asks me if I’m cool and I nod slowly with apprehension. She asks me if I can produce an oil burner out of thin air and I say that I’m sure that I could manage if she’s got a few bucks to front the cost. She says that I can get in on it if I produce it without. I nod.

I stride into a hole in the wall convenience store, remembering this dance from years before. I ask the dark man behind the counter for an oil burner and he produces one out of thin air. It’s got a little fake flower inside. I give him my money and head back to the car. I toss it at her through the window. She asks me if I have some place to go. I nod again. She asks if we can head there. I say, yeah, that’s alright with me.

We’re in my apartment. I turn off the fans, close up the windows, and very nearly stop breathing. She sits on my couch and sets the burner and the meth on the coffee table. I take off my jacket, throw it across the room over a chair, and sit down next to her. She pops open the little baggy and sorts out a few decent looking, nearly bluish looking, rocks and drops them one by one into the bubble at the end of the burner. She looks at me and shrugs. I get up and grab my lighter out of my jacket.

She says she hates the first hit and usually melts it and waits. I say I love the first hit. I put the glass tube to my lips and roll it back and forth, inhaling the sweetly chemical fumes into my lungs and releasing. That’s all it takes. I hand it back to her and she does the same. We pass it back and forth until it’s dead and the bulb is blackened. I grab some tissues and we wipe it down. We get started on the resin.

Not a minute goes by and I’m in love.

I get up and put on some music, and sit back down. We start talking at a fever pitch about indie rock and other typical petty bullshit until, from out of nowhere, she’s on top of me and has her lips pressed into mine as if the world was ending and this was the last time either of us would ever get to screw. I grab her shoulders and push her back a little. I say, hey, well… that’s alright with me.

She loses her top somewhere under the couch, never to be found again. I lose my pants, only to find them the next day in the kitchen sink. Don’t ask me to explain these things, because I couldn’t even if I tried. Her legs are smooth and soft. They look like buttermilk under my fingers. I feel energy radiating off of her, radiating off of me, and radiating back off of her. We could power five houses for three days straight if someone hooked us up to a power grid. With the kind of electricity we were generating, you could save premature babies.

Wandering into the bedroom, I lose everything but my tie. She loses everything but her knee high green and red striped socks. That’s alright with me. That’s alright with her.

It’s not bad, I’ll say that much.

Four hours later, we’re dripping sweat onto each other and the room is spinning like plates. I get into the kitchen and grab water. We struggle to drink it, in order to keep from dying. Laying there on my bed, not with our arms around each other but our bodies in separate locations on opposite ends of the bed, we pant in the general direction of the other.

I look at her and I’m in love. Maybe she’s in love. Maybe she’s not. It doesn’t really matter, because the high I’m riding on is so deep and wide that there is no doubt in my mind that everything is alright.

It’s all alright, and that’s good for her. Hell, it’s good for me.