Crossed

Chapter 2, Part 1

In a cold sweat, the slick salt of slumber sheeted her skin, everywhere. Pores oozing out, liquid legs drifting across her sheets, wiping them dry just to be replaced again, quenched. Thirst woke her from her artistic fantasizations. A jumping jolt to consciousness, the exploding light erupting into the vision of her dark room. She couldn't focus on anything but the sun piercing through the blinds of the window.

What time is it?

She said she would sleep in today, but for how long did she? An exaggerated groan slipped from her lips as she rolled over, rustling the covers across her bare legs like crumpled paper. The blankets had become uncomfortable. In fact, the entire bed had become uncomfortable. She jumped up and a wave of lightheadedness rocked her into submission, throbbing blasts of dehydration trapped her movements into a fetal coil. That's definitely my brain warning me that it's going to be a bad day.

A sense of approaching doom, the light at the end of the tunnel dissolving into darkness. The pent up frustration of her day to day compulsively erraticising: the pundit of delusion. Forgetting transparency of thought and resorting to the muck of anxiety. Flailing reaches, reaching for stability, reaching for purity, striving at the whole cornucopia and its gratitude, but falling short. Imagine The Creation of Adam. The minute separation, the reaching of one finger but the dangling of the others, effort against non-effort. Scrutiny unchartered in the polaric wake. Almost wishing for the days of pregnancy, the lifestyle, the novel, while at the same time archetypal, experiences associated. The warmth of motherhood. And also the insanity. Obsessively arbital and grungy hovering. Worrying, scouting for peace, greeting each new day as a vicarious being: living through a child. The wonder of youth emanating, penetrating into the senses as if a razor sliced a vein. With age comes difficulty. Teenager's frustrations. Court-like accusations. A requirement to defend one's self like one's self has never had to defend before. A mini-me, critiquing constantly, a tribunal of demons with alarm clocks shaking and shaking until the rooster bites your ear off.

What a motivating thought to start the day, She thought.

She opened the drawer next to her bed and pulled it open gently, so that it looked like it took effort to do, slowly scratching its way, wheel against wood, screw by screw. Inside there were several items, each with their cholerical but flashing utility swamping his brain. Grabbing onto ferns to pull one's self along, shoes and toes caked alike, each step a marathon of stress, sinking inch by inch, down to one's waist in slob, brutally reminded of the corroborative indiscretion that was the desire to be at ease. Shrinking, depleting into a detour of daunting drivel. The path of most resistance. The pain of friction.

She reached in and grabbed her vape, a cigarette shaped disposable device, that when you suck on it, you are treated with a nicotine cloud to absorb through your lungs and right into your bloodstream. She felt the ghost of dopamine inject her synapses with a kind of deep water numbness indescribable. She could hear the waves, the muck, and the sand. Gloriously scorching sand, colder as one buried their foot underneath, a soothing cool. The contrast of the two temperatures coated her nerves with flexibility and vitality.

She could sprint. Thumping, shovel-like jumps, sand flying up over her hip-long strands of hair, reaching the gliding seagulls: gawking back the influence of the wild, a densely motivating jar, thundering the blood through her thighs and across the tendons of her knees. Pulling, stretching, the frightening inertia jackhammering her into submission, her toes now began grabbing the sand and descending her momentum, them kicking back higher than ever as the steps dug into the dusty, temperature interspersed, surface of the beachfront. An adrenaline inducing daydream to begin her daily routine, the perfect stoplight to reset and inflame her temptation for trepidation.

She sat there blank minded for a couple more hits. The dam overflowed with a putrid and bursting satisfaction, the nicotine rush, frying the bridge between the sensitively connected neurons in the most vulnerable areas of her brain, searing links like charred rope, burning in the eruption of gunpowder on the poop deck of the pirate-ship.

Okay, she thought, the hallway is the plank and the shower is the ocean. Time to walk the plank.

Exceeding the limit that she had put on herself when her eyes had just opened, the limit called regularized procrastination. Normally on the weekend she would edge her dreams to the furthest extents but today there was a problem. A problem she noticed when the wooden squeak of the drawer had echoed. Her pill bottle. Adderall. Only two left.