Dark Places

05 | todo va a estar bien

❝and i can feel it coming,
i can hear someone screaming
out in the darkness.❞

☽

EVERYTHING IS COLD. It bites into my skin, somehow softening the anger, breaking it apart, like fractured glass, until it cracks and shatters, subsiding into empty rage. Exhaustion.

I don't know how long I sit there.

I feel the chill seep through my jeans to numb my thighs. I watch the headlights of cars pass by me soundlessly, and I count them as the haze flirts through fluttering leaves, lingers on gravel, hangs in a filter of fog. I listen to the fight unravel above my head, drifting from the cracked, blue-tinted window on the corner of Cumberland and Hanover—Jonah and Drake hissing and shouting in strangled Spanglish, slamming doors to cut off a tense conversation about me. I listen until it fades, and then I'm left alone, desperate to hone in on my own slow, slow, slow heartbeat in the sobering silence.

It's impossible to tell time in this city, in an eternity of endless seconds that churn into moments that bleed into hours, suffocating in the quiet discomfort of darkness.

The cigarette between my fingers burns violently, a cherry-red ember glowing, gnawing closer to the filter, pulsing brighter with every faint breeze. The tendrils of smoke twist and coil in the cold, ebb and flow from my lips, only to ride out a lash of wind that destroys a masterpiece of loneliness.

I think about leaving.

It's almost fucking poetic—that I can bring chaos to this sleepy port city. It's almost a victory, a cruel conquest, being the driving force of the noise that can wake Portland from a midnight slumber.

The door shuffles open, and I heave a sigh of defeat. It could only last so long. I flick the cigarette to let go of the ashes, and the next ripple of wind catches the wisps, sending them scattering in a tumultuous tornado to the gravel by my scuffed shoes. The canopy of leaves and branches tremble and shiver around me; the shadows that seemed infinite grow and fester into a decaying veil of blackness over my shoulders.

His footsteps are soft.

"Hey, hermanita."

Jonah.

I force a weak smile, steering my gaze down to the holes in my jeans. The torn, ripped, frayed denim that exposes my bare knees. I'd forgotten how cold Portland could be in September. "Hey, hermano."

His footsteps are timid.

"Thought you might've left."

"Oh, yeah, is that what Drake told you?" I snort quietly, taking a slow drag from the cigarette. The moment I pull it away, a sheen of smoke, coating us, clouding us in a fleeting haze, flowing into inky blackness. It's a tangled grey web against a dark city. "Well, mano," I whisper. "I didn't."

His footsteps slow to a stop.

"Why?"

Hesitantly, I peer up at his long, lean silhouette, half-hidden in a lightless nook of the porch. His expression is difficult to decipher, but as I dig through layers and layers of saturated shadows, I can't find the nervous tick, or the trepidation, or the discreet caution. No. Jonah is staring down at me with genuine concern.

There's only one good thing about Portland. Jonah Brennan.

"Jonah, I don't have anywhere else to go."

"I know," he murmurs, his voice thick. "But I didn't... I didn't know he would be like that, Luz. You know, D is... D is—"

"High."