CW: Drug Abuse, Self-Harm, Attempted Suicide

He tasted like sickness and burnt cigarettes. You’re so fucking sweet, I thought. Please be the death of me.

He had this strange habit of only existing at night. There was a safety in night, in having the world beyond the flickering reach of a street lamp fall away completely. My stomach twisted strangely, a confused mixture of desire and disgust. I couldn’t keep this up for much longer. It was easier to forget about all of my hang ups when the light wasn’t on us, when we were thousands of miles apart, when we were wasted out of our minds, when our fists were bloody. The two younger versions of ourselves squinting up at the same sun and groaning through the same headache.

Sometimes I think I died when I was 15. I was repeatedly trying to strike a match by a gas pump - just to see how it would feel. Maybe that’s why I always loved setting fire to things. I often enjoyed destroying everything before it had the chance to fall apart. Sometimes it was the only option. 

This aching is like a twisted ball of light. It’s like looking into the sun. Easy, from this place, to do stupid things. This place was already oblivion. When the most pivotal years of your life were basically a drug montage intercut with confusing teenage fondling in the moonlit darkness and dragging your shitfaced suicidal friend out of the forest by their wrists, all set to the concrete swirling tones of Massive Attack, maybe you were always doomed to a semi permanent state of bewildered psychedelic reminiscence. 

The simulation governing reality was melting; the pre-dawn streetlight was red-blue over the great nothingness. I remember his lower lip against mine, shredded against his mouth which was full of blood and tasted like spare change and iodine. Like the most beautiful hospital corridor in the most beautiful of dreams. Kneeling next to me in the morning beside the toilet, just another penitent before the altar of a martyred saint. I threw myself gleefully onto the smouldering ashes of the night before. He knew I loved him out of a kind of feral necessity, but then it seemed sometimes that love burned everything inside me, like melted glass under an indifferent sun.

“The sun does come out,” he said, as if hearing my thoughts. “Out here, sometimes.” I didn’t really know how to respond. I always thought the sun had this horrible violence about it. 

He smiles up at me like he has not since he was fourteen - drunk, stoned - fraying from the inside. A high chemical frequency. Everything was numb, my hand, my head, even my teeth. Everything is connected and he can see none of it.

I felt my carefully constructed fortress growing fragile, starting to crack, but I couldn't stop myself. All the things I'd kept bottled up inside would just come flooding out, tearing through the walls. I kissed with too much reverence, with too much care. He wanted to be taken apart, piece by piece. 

Some blood had dried black around his most recent cut, messy and crusted on his palm, and where it had opened up again it left small bloody trails, specks dripping down his jeans and smudges on his left cheek. At least it wasn’t pooling on the floor this time, dampening the carpet beneath me, soaking into my socks, viscous and cloying. 

A whispered memory came up, clouds above us, tinged in pain. “Do you remember..?” I trailed off. He didn’t react. I wanted to sink into myself. This, too, was a familiar pain. Asking him if he remembered. 

“What happened to you,” I said.

He opened his eyes and thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know.” His voice was weak and small, almost inaudible. We were completely alone, just him and me, nobody else in the world. He looked at me, “What if we’re the only people left?”

My breath catches in my throat. He may be right. I feel like I’m on fire. He reaches for me. “Tell me this is not just you trying to drown,” he breathes. Fuck, he knows me so well. He knows my coping mechanisms and what I do to escape and all the places I go to hurt myself.

Neither of us says anything for a while. I’m alone with everything. 

And then he pulls me back in, and it’s just us, the sky darkening by the minute, nothing in our thoughts but each other. It is our world now. Just ours. He begins to speak, but my dream melts away like burning plastic, the noises becoming drained of their volume as I wake up.

Everything is slowed down; neon psychedelic patterns swirl across my eyelids. The smell of burning rain. I am trying to remember you and let you go at the same time.