5:48 [re-write 2.0]

ONE: Chai [Claire]

I had never realized how uncomfortable I was with doing nothing, and being nothing, until I was exactly just that — someone with nothing to do, nowhere to be, and no one to live for. Not anymore.

I wasn't good at being uncomfortable. I was good at a lot of other things, and I guess that's why I had passed for a well-functioning adult in a high-functioning job most days. But whenever I was uncomfortable there was this prickling itch that ran all over my body, which only one very specific thing could solve and trick my brain into feeling a false sense of comfort: A certain level of what-happened-last-night inebriation, followed by the slow burn clarity of death-by-nicotine vaping.

That was the routine these days — inhale the bottles, exhale the smoke. Sleep like the dead, wake up dying. It was a contradicting limbo I liked being in, a hazy clarity that played a lulling white noise in my head.

So when I woke up the day after I quit my job, there was a familiar mild thrumming at the back of my eyes that made me crawl out of bed and reach for my vape on the bedside table. I trudged past Gil snoring on the couch and squinted at the sunrise as I stepped out into the balcony. I watched the sun rise and took a deep inhale of vanilla-flavored liquid. As the cool smoke filled my lungs, I suddenly realized that if people knew I had a balcony they would have thought that someone like me should probably not be given access to one. I coughed on my own grim chuckle as I exhaled the smoke, because what people didn't know is that it didn't really matter even if I sat on the edge of a balcony railing. The truth was I didn't have the courage to die. Nor did I have the courage to truly live. I was stuck in the in-between, the limbo, the hazy clarity, and I liked it there, because the idea of anything more or anything less was just too quiet, or just too loud. All I wanted was the white noise that was just a little bit of something enough to not make it a nothing. So I cherished that white noise while the sun rose and the city awoke before my eyes, enjoying the emptiness of my thoughts.

"Normal people would be drinking coffee to wake up from a hangover." Gil had woken up after a few minutes, and now he stepped out onto the balcony with me with a cup of coffee in hand, still in last night's t-shirt and jeans. He looked pointedly at the vape between my lips, catching me in the middle of a deep inhale.

I breathed out the smoke and Gil sniffed at it, his nose wrinkling at the vanilla-like smell. I pointed the vape at the cup of coffee in his hand and replied, "Normal people would ask before helping themselves to their friends' coffee machine."

Gil shrugged and chugged. "This is my payment for the hours I spent drinking with you last night."

"I didn't ask you to, you know," I reminded, not angrily, just matter-of-factly, because it was true. I had never been the type to seek out company, and especially not these days when I couldn't even stand being in my own company.

"You didn't need to," he said back in the same matter-of-fact tone, pausing a bit before he continued, "because I just know." He didn't expound if it was because he had known me since we were babies learning to play instruments together, or if it was because he knew what it was like to be stuck in limbo, too.

We both watched the rest of the world wake below us, with shops opening up for the breakfast crowd and office goers starting to make the drives down the street. It wasn't until he had taken his last sip of coffee and was about to head back in when I think to ask, "Does it ever get better?"

And because Gil was Gil and he "just knows," he looked at me and said, "If you want it to."

It hadn't really occurred to me before then that I had a choice. It seemed like everything that had happened in my life were things I would have never chosen — things I tried to take into my hands, but they just slipped out of my control. So to me, it didn't really seem like it mattered whether or not I wanted something. It happened anyway.