by Zan Comerford
Photo by Gabriela Camerotti
I used to have dreams of running. All night marathons of feet pounding, feet pounding pavement. I would wake up with the muscles in my body twisted into coils of tension. I would run and jump and punch and scream all of my waking hours away, and still lie in bed awake, my legs twitching with energy, until I would fall asleep and dream of running, of feet pounding pavement.
Shhhnnnorrrrk.
A practiced, fluid motion. From left to right, a wide line of white shot up from the edge of the sink through my nasal passages and into the softness inside my skull.
Speed, Crank, Jib, Shard. Whatever.
My legs lengthen and twist, my shoulders shed bone, growing wings. Weightless. My head rolls back and forth, all I can do is try and keep my skull on my neck.
Whoever is in the mirror should get some sleep. She’s got grey veins; thin skin, yellow skin. I can play with her jaw, back and forth, back and forth, click, click, click. Slapping sounds coming from the bathroom stall, skin on skin. I turn the room around to have a look.
“Fuckin’ veins man, won’t show up to party.”
Oh yeah, I forgot. Rochelle’s started banging her drugs.
Banging, shooting, ripping. Whatever.
Just turn the room back around.
* * *
I ran and I ran until I found something, someone who could keep up. Rochelle was speed for me.
After we got more and more into it, we’d run four or five days awake, strung out. Smoking cigarettes, writing masterpieces, saving the world.
Some apartment. Hotel room. Bathroom. Parkade. Whatever.
We turned clocks into fallacies. We had no week; no night, no day. Our blank eyes burned and dried with constant life.
Following this new calendar, I’d start believing that she was speed, literally. Some walking, talking personification of speed. I would stop talking to her and we’d just stare at each other in silence for hours. Me, trying to figure out if she was human, and her doing just the same.
“The underbelly of the pavement,” we’d call it, as if we had a secret place, a strange new world which only we could get to. Those days and days awake, each of us was the only thing that made sense to the other.
* * *
I pull my finger out of my mouth. Run it along the edge of the sink, then stick it into the cracks of my gums. Perfect little particles of speed stick in the saliva.
“Dirty drugs drip dude, this shit isn’t clean.” The words slide from my mouth, matching the chemical stream sliding down my throat.
The stall door bumps against the frame, and I know that she’s hit it. She exhales, so completely that her spine curves against the door, each bump of vertebrae making a sound like the rapping of knuckles on a table.
“I’m fu… I’m fu…. I’m fucking flying.”
We perform perfectly. We know the script well. It’s the second showing of the day.
* * *
With Rochelle, it was a new race. I had to stretch my legs to keep up. Whatever line I drew, she was always on the other edge of it.
“I find my limits by exceeding them.” The girl may as well have had it tattooed on her shoulder. If I decided to sleep, she’d be scoring for the next morning. I’d talk the talk about getting clean; she’d start banging her drugs. Always had money, always had drugs, and always had an excuse. Hindsight lends no comfort to those who didn’t try to stop her. Her life arrived in a little bag of white death because it was designed to. Broken home, abusive dad, no direction. Start to finish, her life was a textbook case.
* * *
I don’t know how long I’ve been smearing on eyeliner, picking at something in my forehead. There’s black hole of time that appears when you get ripped in front of the mirror.
“I know what you’re doing in there,” a fist on the other side of the door.
“Ro, Ro! We gotta go. Ro!”
Her plastic syringe clinks to the tile floor. Her body follows. From either the poison of the drugs or the poison of the situation, I throw up in the sink.
Her head hitting the tile. My life hitting bottom.
Whatever.
* * *
The line only started getting blurry towards the end. We pushed it further than most, we were lucky. Keep a job, keep your name on the roster in school. Keep a home, or a place to keep your shit. People started noticing soon enough though. With a pack of cigarettes and about 100 pounds between us, we were daring people not to notice.
* * *
I guess this is how these situations always go. I hear the thumping of her foot against the toilet first, her head banging against the stall.
“Ro, lay off, seriously!”
You could trade her skin for the greasy grey tile. Her eyes blank whites, the pupils searching somewhere back in her skull for a reason, how she got from there to here.
My heart was punching itself in my chest.
Beating. Living. Whatever.
* * *
There wasn’t any line after that. We had both toed it for so long, keeping some shamble of a life together for so long, so long.
That night was a host of manslaughter. Rochelle killed all the reasons she had left to get clean, any shreds of whatever was holding her together.
She crossed the line running.
In and out of hospitals, rehab clinics, gutters and dumpsters from then on. Her ghost followed me around town for a while, getting fainter every time, until she became just part of the scenery of the city; dumpster, concrete, garbage, Ro.
I killed the part of myself that made me want to run. I ripped it out of my stomach, coiled up, black and seething, all teeth and claws, and left it there. I left it on the tile floor beside our empty baggies, beside Rochelle’s needles and her bloody cotton balls. I killed that part of myself, slaughtered it in a Dairy Queen bathroom. Now when I dream, I don’t dream of running. Now, I stand dead still.
