Mainline

Seems a long way up to the ceiling. Off-white, cobwebbed, my eyes assess all the different stains and marks the cover the expanse. Arrange them in categories like color, size, type. Wonder how myself or the previous tenants could have managed to stain something so high above us. Had a power cut a couple days ago and the clock on my nightstand still flashes 12:00 ‘cause I can’t make the effort to fix it.

Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix…

That sour onion smell reached my nostrils yesterday and I guess I’ll tolerate it. The telephone hasn’t really rung since I holed myself up in here and curl up and feel sorry for myself because, boo-fucking-hoo, no one’s bothered to check up on poor Woger. I don’t think I’ve got dependency issues. I don’t use all the time - only when I’m really depressed. That’s not dependency. I could go without it if I tried, unlike Rick.

Rick has no fucking self-control, that’s his problem. Weak. He always needs a fix and doesn’t even try to exercise any restraint, not like me. Pretty pathetic. I swing one arm over the side of the bed and grope about underneath until my fingers brush across the prettily-colored shoebox. Yeah, Rick just needs to discipline himself more. His work’s been getting sloppy as a result. Sometimes he doesn’t even show up at the studio at all. I mean, I’m just taking at break at the moment, you know? Collect my thoughts, come back all fresh and inspired.

Cook, watch it bubble chalky, heat so close I can breathe it in. I used to be able to breathe in your heat. Hours under the ceiling breathing in your life-giving body heat, warming my palms on your flushed skin. Was it really five years ago, the last time? I can imagine the dingy sheets below me as your pale flesh. Bury my nose in it, smell my own sweat, hug them to my chest, thin and limp just like the real thing. Trace my fingers over skin-bound vertebrae, your back a beautiful arc that shook perilously when you laughed, then collapsed completely when you fell to meld with the mattress. Genial, squeaky mattress that always provided musical accompaniment to our little games. Those were the happy days.

Hours under the same ceiling. White walls, white sheets, white skin that would get more and more sallow between gradually less-frequent visits. But you kept laughing, made me laugh. Maybe you were laughing at me, not me with you. I could never tell but it didn’t matter either, because you made me so happy like this. Then after The Madcap Laughs, you didn’t so much as smile when I visited. You didn’t really actively participate. That snuffed candle look in your eyes frightened me.

Last time we made it, you were crying. I can’t really remember what I was feeling at the time but it was that usual sense of relief I felt when I was closed inside your warmth, pinning you down. We didn’t do it face-to-face very often but something compelled me then. And all of the sudden you just started crying. I thought nothing of it. Your unpredictable behavior and emotion was commonplace by now so I kept on going. You got hysterical. I got annoyed. A bit violent. I struck you when you wouldn’t stop and you remained silent save for choked sobs until I finished.

‘What the fuck is your problem, Syd?’ I left you staring blankly at the ceiling above.

Take one side of the rubber bit in my teeth, the other clenched in my free hand and pull, pull, pull until the vein looks like it’s about to burst in a spray of thick red. Judy saw me do it once toward the end and told me I did it just like an experienced junkie, only she wasn’t smiling. Women; fucking cunts. They always worry, always make things out to be worse than they are. You’d never do that, would you? You’d understand.

One bite and all’s over. Mother’s milk noiselessly sinking inside, to the very core of my being. I hiss relief and sink down into the pillows, jerk the yellow off my arm and dump into back into the box. This mattress is cold and noiseless.

Your sunken eyes stared at me just as accusingly four days ago as they always did. Varying levels over the years, mind, but always eerily aware, always reproachful.

‘You know who that is over there? That’s Syd.’

You seemed confused but not altogether gone. You still looked at me the same way, like you were assuring me that you hadn’t forgotten. I cried and so did Rick. You sat adjacent me at David and Ginger’s reception and just smiled quietly at everyone but me. Each time you looked at me it was just like a slap. You were saying something about pork chops but I invested all my concentration in my next cigarette, fumbling ridiculously with the lighter while my hands trembled like a bowl of dodgy gelatin. Fingers itchy for the trigger.

Sink into the sweat-cigarette-scented sheets, pull them ‘round my body like a cotton cocoon. Wanna feel my lips running a course up your spine while you lie there giggling over some cosmic joke. When I close my eyes I still see the wild mess of dark hair sticking to your pink cheeks, Gohill’s boots lying in the corner of the room. Those two freckles on your hip that I always treated as some type of checkpoint. If I screw my eyes up real tight I see your teeth, mouth split open wide in an ever-present grin, smell the cigarettes and paint and earth on your skin. Salty, bitter skin that I could go on devouring until I finally ate you alive…Christ, I’d wished I could. Gobble you up like a fairy tale crone and never manage to rid my mouth of the chalky paint taste. And your disembodied Cheshire Cat grin would be the only thing remaining until I overtook that with my lips and teeth and tongue.

I can feel it washing over me now, the first waves of euphoria. Oh fuck yes, suffocate me…suffocate me until I can’t feel anything but the warm, soothing ebb and flow of indifference. Wrap me up tight just like those frail arms. Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby, but it’s as near as dammit. Take me inside, deep. Fucking consume me whole.

Submerge me in your wet velvet mouth the way you used to.